ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a cognitive conceptualization of personal mythology that presents a model for working with an individual's personal mythology, and considers the integral relationships among personal myths, family myths, and cultural myths. It synthesizes existing cognitive theory with observations from working with the mythologies of scores of individuals in clinical, educational, and community settings, and derives different propositions that summarize understanding of the way that personal mythologies evolve. In weekly psychotherapy, as contrasted with a workshop format, clients move through the process at varying paces and the design is adjusted to fit their unique situation and needs. Since the workshop format is more uniform, the chapter discusses five-stage model for teaching people to identify and work with their own guiding myths. It finally presents the conviction that clinicians and educators who work with families are pressed to attune themselves to the mythic tides that buoy changing social conditions.
