by Jacob W. Glazier
The stories we tell about ourselves matter, even more so when we put exceptional experiences into words. Often, the frameworks we use to make sense of ourselves and the world necessarily exclude such experiences, seeing them as coincidence, accident, misperception, or, in some clinical cases, as indicative of psychopathology. Critical approaches to parapsychology would understand this as a function of power in discourse and ideology that shapes what becomes permissible and sanctioned truths (Glazier, 2023). When talking about exceptional experiences, few spaces are safe, supportive, validating, and nonjudgmental. Therapy should be one of these spaces, but unfortunately, this is not always the case. Clinicians are not adequately educated or trained to assess for exceptional experiences and differentiate them from mental illness (Rabeyron, 2022). This inadequacy shows even more when working with an adolescent population, as adolescence represents a unique developmental time.
When talking about exceptional experiences, few spaces are safe, supportive, validating, and nonjudgmental. Therapy should be one of these spaces, but unfortunately, this is not always the case... This inadequacy shows even more when working with an adolescent population, as adolescence represents a unique developmental time.
Exceptional experiences have many different presentations and can be classified in a variety of ways. Stories about experiencing an apparition or hearing others’ thoughts, for example, can mimic the symptoms of a psychotic disorder. Experiences of oppression can resemble the symptoms of a major depressive episode. Cases of possession may be understood through the category of dissociative identity disorder (Glazier & Robinson, 2025). The list could go on, but the point is that diagnostic manuals are very robust and efficient at categorizing a vast array of human experiences under a psychiatric nosology and its watchful eye. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) (American Psychiatric Association, 2022) is predominantly used in the United States, while the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) (World Health Organization, 2019) is used in the rest of the world. These manuals’ provide categories to describe human experiences and are the central frameworks used to train mental health professionals–in fact, it may not be that well known that if therapists take insurance, they must include an ICD-10 diagnosis code indicating medical necessity (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2024). (In the United States healthcare model, the DSM provides a name for the symptomology, but the ICD sources diagnostic codes.) The story, we could say, has mostly been about pathology and treatment.
Once clinicians have done their due diligence in differentiating mental illness from exceptional experiences, an entire horizon of possibilities opens as to what exactly the client is experiencing. Perhaps stories include various fantasies that are indicative of the client’s underlying psychodynamics; perhaps they are real encounters with non-human intelligences; perhaps they are actual instances of psi; perhaps they are all these options and more. The important point is that in a strong, clinical sense this should not really matter. As Roxburgh and Evenden (2016) relate based on the findings from their qualitative study, therapists need to be able to help the client explore the meaning behind these experiences and, importantly, that some exceptional experiences “can be comforting, life-enhancing and adaptive… contribut[ing] to better psychological well-being” (pp. 545-546). The stories matter, and how we tell them matters. Barring any ethical mandate to intervene, as in cases of extreme suicidal or homicidal ideation, therapists should not see themselves as police detectives trying to figure out the real “facts” from deception. Instead, as narrative therapy advocates, the therapist adopts a curious, decentered stance with the client, helping them to reauthor their story, handing them the power to do just that (White & Epston, 1990).
Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy is a postmodern form of therapy that arises from the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1977, 2002). The founders of narrative therapy are Michael White and David Epston (1990), who believed that the expert-oriented stance of most modernist forms of therapy, from psychoanalysis to cognitive-behavioral therapy (Ginter et al., 2018), perpetuated grand stories that were harmful to clients or forced them to act and think in specific ways. Psychiatry and mental health practitioners who are trained to assess for psychopathology likewise run the risk of harming clients by over-pathologizing or mistaking an experience for a mental illness. Being postmodern in nature, narrative therapy is attuned to the way that power, ideology, and language shape experiences and, as a result, is similar to other styles of therapy that arose around the same time, including feminist therapy, LGBTQ therapy, strength-based therapy, solution-focused therapy, as well as others (Ginter et al., 2018).
The exceptional experience is not the problem; the problem is the problem. This is a rephrasing of a famous dictum in narrative therapy: the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem (Freedman & Combs, 1996). Indeed, the experience itself is rarely the issue at stake. The way that clients make sense of it, understand its meaning in relation to their lives and relationships, and, importantly, have internalized and fused the problem with their identity results in negative symptoms like distress and dysfunction. According to White and Epston (1990), therapists should engage the client in externalizing conversations that help externalize the problem, allowing them to see that it is not a function of who they are in terms of something being wrong with them. The problem is created by mistaking ourselves for the problem in the story.
There are a variety of techniques that narrative therapists use to aid in externalization, including naming and describing the problem, even in an anthropomorphic way. For instance, White (1984) provides the example of using externalizing conversations when working with a child who was struggling with encopresis or not soiling their clothes and appropriate bathroom behavior. The therapist joins with the child and their family to name the problem “sneaky poo” in order to establish “a context of contest, a context within which the child can be pitted against his/her symptoms” (p. 153). Through a series of externalizing questions, the therapist asks the child how they have outwitted the problem, instances when the problem was not as dominant, and examples that go against the established narrative of the problem. In narrative therapy, this process is called tracing the influence of the problem and establishing unique outcomes (White & Epston, 1984). Apart from simple naming, as in the previous example, the narrative therapist might have the client sketch or draw what the problem looks like. Alternatively, the narrative therapist might use a prop that can represent the problem for the client, physically referring to it during the therapy session. There are many creative ways to externalize the problem, and the important point is to help the client see the problem as external from their self-concept.
Adolescent Egocentrism and Exceptional Experiences
Adolescence represents a unique developmental time to talk about the internalization process–how the self comes to identify with the problem. While an externalization process might be helpful to deal with identified “problems” in a therapeutic setting, an internalization process goes along with the natural evolution of the ego and self that happens during adolescence. David Elkind (1967) famously described the rise of egocentrism during adolescence, including the construction of an imaginary audience where adolescents feel that others are constantly watching, evaluating, or judging them and the creation of a personal fable that can take the form of invincibility, uniqueness, or grandiosity. Importantly, this egocentrism is not negative, wrong, or pathological but represents a normal developmental process that provides narcissistic cushioning for the adolescent’s emerging identity. There is a lot to be said here regarding the importance of fantasy, imagination, and exceptional experiences in identity development, throughout the entire lifespan, starting in childhood and into adulthood, not just in adolescents.
As a case in point, concerning childhood mystical experiences, Hart (2004) argues against interpreting unusual experiences as merely fantasy or imagination since this dismisses the importance that these have on the life of the child—dismissing them discounts unique ways of childhood knowing that can express deeper forms of wonder, empathy, and meaning-making. Taking these experiences seriously can help reveal important spiritual, psychological, and developmental realities. From a more psychoanalytic perspective, imagination and fantasy—or as it is sometimes more technically referred to as the imaginary (Lacan, 2006)—are absolutely essential for healthy development, being interwoven into the very fabric of the psyche. In a fundamental sense, the tributaries of the imaginary, including daydreams, future possibilities, romantic aspirations, career goals, and dreams themselves, can never be divorced from “objective” assessments of reality or the self. This discussion is even more salient considering the often subjective, psychic, imaginal, or spiritual nature of many exceptional experiences—that they are not very easily made amenable to the techniques of science, rendered as measurable and observable. Hence, modernist techniques and therapies stemming from natural science (e.g., behavioral therapies, psychiatry, etc.) struggle or completely fail to capture these experiences holistically in their richness (Churchill & Fisher-Smith, 2026). Rhea White (2002) argues that proper understanding of exceptional experiences requires attending to the personal meaning and the human story, over and above experimental and statistical approaches. She advocates for the central place of narrative in exceptional experiences, concluding that stories matter and that more attuned and compelling narratives can bridge the gap between professional practitioners, like scientists or clinicians, and the general public (White, 2002).
From a postmodern and narrative therapy perspective, the egocentrism endemic to adolescence presents a developmental stage in which easy narcissistic identifications, cathexes, and associations shape the adolescent’s identity in crucial and pivotal ways—the stories that we come to tell about ourselves can both expand and contract, setting the stage for later storytelling. As a result, therapists working with adolescents who are having exceptional experiences should be mindful that identity during this life stage is both prone to fantasy and magical thinking, such as the personal fable (Elkind, 1967), but also that such egocentrism likewise becomes the crucial glue by which adolescents are able to piece together an emerging adult identity (Erikson, 1968) through what they have learned from their family of origin, culture, media, education peer group, and so on. Mathijsen (2010) notes in their study of adolescents who have had paranormal experiences that “young people must either deny their experience or accept the experience as real and broaden or change their paradigmatic structure” (p. 356). According to Mathijsen (2010), these experiences can be a cause for anxiety, and the way the adolescent cognitively structures them—through denial or paradigmatic change—directs their identity development. Importantly, adolescents tend to be curious about these kinds of experiences; how they cognitively handle them determines their relationship to them in terms of their identity. Consequently, adolescence represents a challenging time for clinicians who work with clients having exceptional experiences in this regard insofar as clinicians must contend with the necessary developmental fantasy-proneness while holding a non-judgmental space for understanding how exceptional experiences might fit into the client’s personal narrative.
In fact, problematizing an exceptional experience during this stage of development —conceptualized as part of egocentric fantasy or a psychopathology—can have deleterious effects on the emerging self-story that the adolescent is constructing for themselves. To use terms from narrative therapy, these adolescents may end up constructing a problem-saturated story, learning to associate the exceptional experience in a semantically negative way and, even worse, may come to see the self as flawed, lacking, or deficient (White & Epston, 1990). They learn to auto-regulate their behavior and discipline the self accordingly (Foucault, 1977). Of course, this does not mean that all exceptional experiences are positive for clients or should be construed as such by therapists. By way of one example, poltergeist or psychokinetic experiences are often frightening and disturbing to clients and their families (Houran et al., 2019). The point here is to encourage therapists working with clients who have exceptional experiences to avoid internalizing the problem and help clients externalize it—name, describe, and construct the problem as out in the world rather than as a function of the self.
The exceptional experience is not the problem; the problem is the problem.
The Case Study of Maya
Exceptional, mystical, anomalous, spiritual, paranormal, or whatever word we want to use to describe these experiences does not necessitate that the experience is problematic, should not happen, is not real, or is not valid. These adjectives are ways of storying our experiences. The language communities that clients are a part of go toward furthering the possibility of describing human experience in these ways or not, as in the case of psychiatry and the DSM. As Lukoff (1985) notes, even psychotic features detailed by one of the diagnostic manuals can be indicative of profound, transformational, mystical, and spiritual experiences – rather than suppress these experiences, clinicians should accommodate their growth-promoting potential. Narrative therapy can help facilitate the authoring of a story that feels best for that specific client, despite or in the face of outside pressures that might suggest otherwise. In this way, narrative therapists help clients thickly describe (White, 1995) their preferred stories, those that feel the most right to the client, contain their personal values, expand their future possibilities, and are resilient in the face of competing stories. The way that a narrative therapist does this is by asking curious, open-ended questions of the client, engaging in externalizing conversations, mapping the influence of the problem, and helping clients create a narrative that is detailed, coherent, and resilient (White & Epston, 1990).
By way of illustrating a narrative therapy approach to exceptional experiences, it might be helpful to consider the following brief case study:
Maya, a 16-year-old student, often feels as though others are constantly watching and judging her and tends to see her experiences as uniquely significant. One night, Maya awakens and sees what appears to be an elderly woman standing quietly at the foot of her bed. The figure disappears after several seconds. Maya experiences the encounter as deeply meaningful and begins to think it may indicate that she has an unusual sensitivity to the spirit world.
Staying aware of the developmental concerns associated with adolescence, a narrative therapist would adopt a curious position about this experience, helping Maya to understand and externalize the “specialness” that has become intertwined with the experience. The narrative therapist might ask Maya to name the experience and seek to understand how this experience influences Maya’s life by asking the following questions: What does it encourage you to believe about yourself? How does it affect your relationships? Does it bring you closer or further from the people you value? What kind of person does the experience suggest that you are becoming? What concerns do you have about the influence of the experience? If this story continued to shape your life for the next year, where might it lead? Is that a direction you would choose?
Through a series of curious, open-ended questions similar to the ones above, the narrative therapist would be able to guide Maya to a thick description of her preferred story. This thick description would be the meaning generated out of the therapeutic process, co-constructed by the therapist and Maya. Even though the adolescent client displays egocentrism of being special or unique given the strangeness of the experience, the narrative therapist helps the client understand what does this mean for them and their lives, that is,how it is a problem or not and how being special in this way influences their relationships with others and their own identity development. In Maya’s case, perhaps the experience is more about staying open to curiosity and mystery, rather than focusing on how the self is special or unique, which is typical with adolescent egocentrism.
In terms of clinical approaches to exceptional experiences, narrative therapy has a lot to offer by way of its attunement to discourse, ideology, and power. This is, of course, not to mention its philosophical allyship with critical theory and critical parapsychology (Glazier, 2023). Clinically, therapists can help clients externalize the problem from the self, which may not be endemic to the exceptional experience, only becoming as such because of reigning narratives that seek to problematize or pathologize these unique, thin descriptions. The way that we facilitate meaningful, hopeful, and resilient conversations about what happens next is crucial when working with clients but also when envisioning the future of clinical scholarship on exceptional experiences.
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In this first of a double issue of Mindfield Bulletin on “Clinical Approaches for Exceptional Experiences in Children and Adolescents,” Gerhard Mayer contributes his 2026 Presidential Address, arguing that parapsychology is often unfairly labeled as pseudoscience and contends that the term should be reserved for scientific practices that intentionally obstruct or distort knowledge rather than …
by Gerhard Mayer, 2026 Presidential Address
