All Over But the Shoutin'

272). In impairment of register therapy the answer is clear. Narrative Therapy holds that people can become experts in their own lives, and view problems as separate from themselves. By re-telling the stories of his sustenance, Bragg reduces the harm of his childhood. "The narrative metaphor proposes that persons live their lives by stories . . . and that these stories provide the anatomical structure of life" (White, 1992, p. 123). Bragg examines his past experiences with love and hatred, with self-doubt and self-knowledge, with resentment and pride, with wrath and compassion. He struggles to leave his harsh past behind him, that is too tightly tied to it. And he does not trust to squander "the knowledge and the stories that (my drive) and my people hold inside them" (Bragg, 1997, p. xvi).

A key concept of Narrative Therapy is that writing and re-writing bingle's own life accounting can give "positive meaning to what others exponent have experienced as adversity" (Freedman & Combs 1996, p. 10). Bragg's youth was one of adversity yet in his book he reinterprets the " heading" reality of his childhood experiences as the second of three sons of a poverty-stricken "white-trash" family in rural Alabama, of an alcoholic, abusive begin and of a self-sacrificing, loving mother. To a large degree, Bragg relates his story in basis of his mother. He describes himself as the boy who climbed up her backbone "to esca

Bragg has a tendency to place his mother on a pedestal; she can do no wrong. He also has a tendency to place his bewilder into the evil demon category. In retelling the stories of his father he searches for a kind of understanding and reconciliation, but not healing. It is as if forgiving his father would be a betrayal of his mother's suffering and his own. Bragg's father was an alcoholic who abused his beloved mother, and frightened his three children; his parents were perpetually separating and reconciling until they finally broke up when Bragg was a child leaving Bragg with an enormous amount of anger and resentment.

He posterior comes to know that his father's experience as a soldier in the Korean War may have caused his bad behavior, but knowing is not forgiving. He writes, "I understand him rectify now, understand the pounding his character endured in that defining clip overseas. But somewhere between understanding and forgiveness thither is another wall, too wide to get around" (Bragg, 1997, p. xxi).

Bragg ne'er fully comes to terms with his father in the book. His own relationships with women evidently all fail because he doesn't want responsibility. In this area, he realizes "I was my father's son after all" (Bragg, p. 146). Still, in terms of Narrative Therapy, Bragg was able to externalize the problems he faced with his father. He was able to tell a somewhat different story of himself using the same events. Overall, in his book Rick Bragg re-examined his plethoric restraining narrative from a new angle.

American writer Eudora Welty wrote: "The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order. . . it is a regular thread of revelations." This is what Bragg achieves in his book. It is also in keeping with the article of faith of Narrative Therapy that

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