Extracurricular Therapy: Sometimes, Clients and Their Therapists Need to Get out of the Office

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My office is no nonsense--a single sunny window, a blond oak floor, a metal bookshelf holding the titles of my trade: the DSM, Beck's Cognitive Therapy, Epston and White's Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, Sackler's Assessment for Children. These are books without a whiff of whimsy; they are books grounded in study, even statistics; books about how to help by rearranging the grammar of pain, so a different sort of story emerges.

For much of my career as a therapist, I have focused on intervention, putting my metaphorical hands inside someone's metaphorical mind and tweaking negative self-statements, poorly thought out plot points. In this sense, I was not unlike an …