ABSTRACT
Michael White and David Epston (1990) use the text analogy to conceptualize human problems. They believe that humans give meaning to their lives by storying their experiences and that a person comes to therapy oppressed by a dominant problem-saturated narrative. Consequently, therapy focuses on the generation of alternative stories that enable a person to experience a sense of agency in his/her life. One way of generating alternative stories is through what White and Epston (1990) refer to as “externalizing.” They describes externalizing as “an approach that encourages persons to objectify and, at times to personify the problems that they experience as oppressive. In this process, the problem becomes a separate entity and thus external to the person or relationship that was ascribed as the problem” (White and Epston, 1990, p. 38). White's original work with externalizing was predominantly with families that identified the problem to be with a child. For example, in a case involving encopresis, White (1984) and a family of three generate an alternative story by externalizing the child's encopresis as “sneaky poo.” As the family came to understand how “sneaky poo” had affected each of them and their relationships with each other, they could begin to explore stories of standing up to the influence of “sneaky poo.”
