I ask people a number of questions to get them to portray their life in terms of story terms:  Describe the theme of your life story; Describe your character role in it; Describe the tone of it;  Describe the trajectory.  For example, one question asks:

Which is your story?

a.  A good past has led to a good present

b.  A good past has led to a bad present

c.   A bad past has led to a good present

d.   A bad past has led to a bad present

While it may, at first, seem artificial or simplistic to ask people to reduce their entire, quite complicated, endlessly nuanced history to one of four rather blunt scenario’s (elsewhere I ask is your story a Comedy? a Tragedy? a Overcoming the Monster?  a Quest?) I treat this as a first step. It gets one thinking. It enables you to see structure where perhaps you did not before; to recognize that there is an end toward which every life, like every story is driving. And because one’s life is obviously more complicated than broad descriptions like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (and ‘past’ and ‘present’ for that matter) can ever portray, simple questions like these tend to promote elaboration).

Perhaps there’s something presumptuous about asking questions like the multiple choice earlier and making people comment to the ‘best possible answer’ to describe their incredible stories. But another useful reason to paint it, initially, in such broad terms is that people are pretty adept at describing the mood of their failing story. Only then can they start to pick apart the potentially false, toxic details that have made it so.