Let's use a giant hedge in Vienna that I hung out with last summer to illustrate a feature of therapeutic and spiritual practice: externalization.
Wikipedia will tell you that Michael White, founder of Narrative Therapy, developed externalization. However, externalization has been a critical feature of meditative practice, Asian philosophy, and psychology for centuries. So what is it? It is the recognition (and associated techniques) that our identity, base consciousness, or essence (or non-essence, depending on your view) is NOT one with the currents of our thinking and feeling perception. Yes, we have minds and bodies that, as mechanisms of the cosmos, construct sensory, emotional, and cognitive phenomena. However, we also have a status and capacity beyond these many states of being that color our reality. Exploring this idea and perceptual posture can enhance a sense of personal agency and empower the intrapsychic change process in therapy.
For many, severe suffering arises when we rigidly identify and become deeply enmeshed in distressing cognitive and emotional patterns. Externalization practices are one way to illuminate this process while empowering humans to disentangle themselves from unwholesome enmeshments. One common refrain in therapy that conveys this idea is, "You are not the problem. The problem is the problem." More specifically, in the case of anxiety, one can explore affirming "I am experiencing anxiety" or "I am observing anxious thoughts" versus "I am anxious." We realize that the mind can create nightmares, but we aren't essentially the nightmare. The body can create disease, but we are not the disease. This can shake loose long-held assumptions and free us to engage skillfully with a myriad of forces to reduce or eliminate rigid patterns of suffering.
There are many ways externalization practice is explored and taught. But ultimately, these practices create a space between the observer/experiencer and what is being observed/experienced. In Euro-American therapeutic approaches, storytelling, linguistic framing, creative arts, and observation play a crucial role in enhancing this understanding, which is often sufficient for therapeutic effects to occur for many. In Asian contemplative traditions, specific forms of meditation, visualization, and ritual can utilize externalization processes. Most of us are enmeshed in the objects of our consciousness throughout the day without a second thought. So, externalization practice is just that, a practice. It often takes time for the experiencer to start teasing out conscious awareness from the momentary, ever-changing processes bubbling up at any moment. But even beginning this process can produce revelatory and restorative impacts.
This perspective is also why I do not shy away from labeling forces of the mind as negative, maladaptive, counterproductive, or unwholesome. This labeling practice is a common feature of Buddhist practice and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. However, some therapists avoid this, understandably concerned clients will internalize these labels as selfhood. Yet, a view that embraces externalization practice avoids or lessens the threat of identification (or further entrenching identification). From this perspective, calling a spade a spade is empowering because it aids in the conceptualization of what creative energies support or hinder well-being. Our essence and inherent worth have nothing to do with these creations. However, we are participants in this process. The sooner we can articulate these forces and not cling to them, the more psychological flexibility, agency, and empowerment are produced.
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