Salus Forum: May 2025

In psychology, we have something called distal and proximal perspectives. One way to think of the objectivist perspective is to consider it a distal perspective. Numbers are a way in which we view the world from afar. It’s about quantity. It’s what’s called the nomothetic approach. We gather as much numbers as we can, as many samples as we can to convince people. The larger the sample size, the greater the chance of obtaining significant results.

We can contrast this with narrative reports. This approach is essentially based on a constructivist perspective. Socially constructed reality was the concept Berger and Luckmann introduced many years ago. From this perspective, there is no verifiable reality. There are only interpretations of reality, constructions of reality, using a number of different ways in which to report these constructions. Even the scientific method is itself a construction and an arbitrary construction. You can look at Thomas Kuhn’s work and others about the history of scientific revolutions. The constructivist perspective pops right out.

So, what are narratives? These are stories. These are testimonials. These are case studies. They tend to be proximal rather than distal, as they tend to be up close and personal.

Gay

I will begin by first saying that my peak performance was having the opportunity to work with Bill B for several years. I next wish to consider what to you do when it comes to somebody who has lifelong trauma. I treat a lot of those folks who have lifelong trauma. They have been in and out of the medical community with psychotropic meds. They have been in and out of the behavioral health community from therapist to therapist. How do we shift their narrative about what is normal if there is such a thing? What can they hope to adapt to? Because they don’t often have a vision or hope other than to NOT be something. They don’t always know what they’re moving towards or what they’re trying to achieve. I think as behavioral health clinicians, what we have to do is help create that reality.

I want to speak about these constructed realities. We can believe in the possibility of something even though it’s an unknown. I would say in terms of where our world is currently, there are a lot of things that are happening in our world that none of us would necessarily have predicted–COVID being one of those things. And had it even been proposed as a possibility, many of us would have said that will never happen, We’ll never live through a pandemic because of modern science.

Bill B, you were asking: how do we as a collective group help those folks? What’s a narrative that they can live into?