The Dramatization of Life

There is no flattery intended in referring to someone as a drama queen. Being prone to drama is seemingly something to resist. Are we intended, then, to live undramatic lives? Are we better off making sense of our days and the unfolding events contained in them by rational means? Should we turn to science and diagnostic language to make our struggles intelligible?

 Narrative therapists favor drama. In fact, itis indispensable to our practice. Without it, people are made out as ordinary and life is cast in dull tones. Problems, too, when identified by pre-established criteria, can contribute to an experience drained of color save for the dingy blue or gray utilized to make carbon copies.

 Far from recognizing the curious characters and novel plot points that make their way into our offices, we mistake them for duplicates. Those who reach out to us, seeking relief, have been restricted to a narrow range of linguistic options contributing to ever-increasing numbers of sufferers being reduced to one of a dwindling number of “disorders”.

Before long, it seems, we will all be known according to an anxiety disorder of one kind or another, a depressive condition, an attentional problem, or an addictive tendency, with anything in the way of more stirring characterizations all but purged from the lexical field.

Anthropologist, Ruth Behar, asks: “Can we give both the observer and the observed a chance at tragedy” (1996, p. 18)? This is meant to support practitioners in finding color in the lives of the people who consult us with a concentration as intense as the crimsons and emeralds we would hope to find in our own lives.