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A Tool for In-Person Clinical Setting

 

Do you ever have a client that is having trouble putting their thoughts and feelings into words?

 

Do your clients ever just report on what happened this week - and you like them to get more in touch with the actual experience?

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Do you ever hava a client who doesn't really know WHAT they are feeling?

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BioGraffs is a totally unique tool for your therapeutic toolbox, whatever your modality.

BioGraffs is a method:

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• To help clients who are caught up in their own stories

• To help people get distance from their story (externalize)

• To help people talk about hard topics, with you or with a partner

• To help clients share their experience with you

• To gain clarity on confusing issues

• For clients who feel stuck

• For clients when you are feeling stuck

• For couples to understand each other better

• For families that need help hearing each other

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The BioGraffs method is for any clinician looking for ways to expand their repertoire of approaches, and interested in exploring narrative and storytelling techniques. Internal storytelling is how people integrate and make sense out of the external events and experiences of their lives. Externalizing these narratives and metaphors affords an opportunity for people to create distance from events and become the protagonist of their own choosing in the stories of their lives. It gives people a way to create a visual narrative about an aspect of their lives as a physical metaphor of experience that is separate from language. It helps people to slow down in their stories and deconstruct them externally, removing them from the mental tangle of the default mode network. 

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WHAT IS THE BIOGRAFFS METHOD EXACTLY?

BioGraffs is a method of externalizing complex thoughts and feelings by attaching them to objects - 1 cm colored cubes - and then manipulating them to express complex ideas and relationships. 

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You start with a prompt: something that occurs naturally out of the work you are doing together. Here are some examples:

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• What happens in an argument between you and your partner?

• What is a day in your depression like?

• How does your anxiety manifest in your mind?

• How do you self-soothe when you are triggered?

• What happened in your traumatic experience?

• Show me a time you felt powerless

• What is your preferred sexual flow?

• What are you getting compared to what you want?

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You will direct you client to think of the PARTS of the experience they are going to tell you about. Each part (a thought, feeling, action, event, abstraction, etc) gets assigned one of 10 colors.

 

Now they have 200 cubes to arrange in ways that express how these parts relate to one another. They browse through the 8 example cards that represent 8 different ways people tend to approach this activity. Will they make something like a timeline of an event? The things that happen, showing order and proportion, and how they feel about it?

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Will they make a mosaic, that expresses through metaphor how these things relate to one another?

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Will they compare how these things manifest in different situations?

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People often talk through what they are doing as they work and you might offer gentle guidance. When they are done, they might explain to you what it means. 

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Take a look at this video of a client making a BioGraff about parenting her anxious child:

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