Mapping Identity Through Moonlight: A Narrative Therapy Reflection

When a close family member compared the collaged moon boards I was using to process a difficult time in my life to that meme of the man frantically mapping red strings on the wall, I didn’t laugh.

I had just told them I was on the edge of autistic burnout. That I was struggling with emotional flooding. That I had been formally diagnosed with adjustment disorder and was pretty sure I had cPTSD. They heart-reacted to the message but never replied. I was sitting on the couch involuntarily shivering at the time.

They thought I was spiralling, and perhaps I was, but I wasn’t unravelling, nor was I conspiracy theorying. I was stitching myself back together after years of complete disassociation.

At the time, I was off work, studying, and parenting two small boys. My social world thinned. Old friends disappeared. Family stepped back.

So I turned inward.

The moon boards started as instinct. They became a visual ritual that acknowledged how much I loved a good collage and a way to ground the swirling static of my thoughts. I followed the Northern Hemispherian names of the moons as a starting point: Wolf Moon, Worm Moon, Strawberry Moon. Each one had an emerging theme: grief, justice, belonging, rebirth. I mapped symbols, lyrics, quotes, colours, and moods.

Without knowing it, I was using key principles from narrative therapy. I wasn’t just making moodboards with huge layers of information. I was mapping memory, identity, and meaning.

Later, I enrolled in an asynchronous short course on narrative therapy. I didn’t want a career change, just language for what I was already doing. As I moved through the material, something clicked. For the most part, I wasn’t learning something new. I was remembering what I’d already done, now with the language to explain it.

Narrative therapy emerged from the work of Michael White and David Epston, who believed that people are not defined by their problems. Instead of treating someone as broken or disordered, narrative therapy externalises the issue, separates the person from the problem, and centres the idea that our lives are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves, and the ones told about us.

What struck me most wasn’t just the therapeutic lens, but the narrative one. I had always processed life visually and words often failed me, especially under stress. I’ve never kept a regular written journal, but I’ve always made images, playlists, and written notes in the margins of things. What I was doing with the moon boards wasn’t only aesthetic escapism; it was a form of narrative practice that was grounded in visual and symbolic language rather than linear text.

In visual narrative theory, meaning doesn’t unfold through paragraphs. It moves through motifs, spatial arrangements, colour, and rhythm. Comics scholars like Scott McCloud have long argued that visual storytelling carries a grammar of its own. It has a way of sequencing memory and emotion that doesn’t rely on words. For neurodivergent thinkers especially, this can be a lifeline.

So, while the narrative therapy course introduced concepts like “reauthoring” and “externalisation,” I realised I’d already been doing that work through collage. I wasn’t mapping thoughts in bullet points or traditional sessions, I was mapping symbols, archetypes, and themes in moonlight.

I was processing my story the only way I knew how: through pattern, image and resonance. It wasn’t therapy in the formal sense. But it was something, and it seemed to be working.

The moon board I chose to share from this process is the one I created during the Pink Moon, a full moon often linked with themes of nurturing and renewal. For me, it was mapped to Jung’s concept of ego. Not the ego as arrogance, but the ego as boundary, as survival strategy, as the constructed concept of self.

This board was not pretty, even if the colours were, but it wasn’t designed for likes. It was confronting. It held song lyrics and confessions I hadn’t said out loud. It included screenshots from ADHD support sites, snippets about difficult co-parenting, quotes on black-and-white thinking, and bitter truths from Trap artists Dave and Central Cee about what happens when you are the one who cuts someone off, even when they handed you the scissors.

It was a board about motherhood, but not the Instagram kind. It held pain around how I was raised, and how I was trying not to repeat those patterns with my own children. I found myself asking: Am I naïve, or just hyper-domesticated? Or is it just the trauma?

The persona I had examined in previous moon boards; competent, calm, grateful, was cracking. I had spent years people-pleasing myself into exhaustion, pleasing a version of others I had built in my own mind through intense conditioning. The Pink Moon board confronted that. It said: Let me be in charge of the pace, let me walk my journey, love me unconditionally, or let me go.

If Jung described the first half of life as a time of ego formation and the second half as ego reunification, this board sat right on that threshold. I was no longer sure where the mask ended and the self began, but I knew I didn’t want to return to the old performance.

Making that board helped me see how many internal voices I was carrying: maternal, wounded, defiant, dissociated, divine. And slowly, through the images and sounds, they began to speak to each other.

What I built isn’t a universal tool. It is deeply personal, but it is adaptable. Mapping identity timelines, layering archetypes, and creating symbolic storyboards can offer an entry point for others that feel left out of traditional care. It may not be evidence-based in the academic sense, but it is lived evidence. And for many of us, that counts.

What I didn’t realise until much later is that my moon boards were working with the very tools narrative therapy holds most sacred: metaphor, symbol, and story.

The boards weren’t just aesthetic mood maps. They were a living metaphor; an evolving series of externalised identities and questions. In narrative therapy, metaphor and symbolic language allow clients to express emotions and meanings that often elude rational explanation. Narrative therapists are trained to listen for metaphors spontaneously offered by the client, knowing that these often hold the key to deeper understanding and change.

Dave’s Trap lyric about being handed the scissors became a visual metaphor for boundary-setting. A still from a Ruger video became a symbol of self-respect and a reminder about the future of my children. A line about being a spirit guide captured my sense of relational fatigue and intuitive clarity. Each collage became a space to explore what these images represented and how they might shift over time.

In this way, narrative therapy gave me language for the symbolic work I was already doing. But it also gave me a map for understanding how my story was shaped by the systems around me.

Drawing on systems theory, narrative therapy acknowledges that problems don’t exist in a vacuum, in fact, they are shaped by interactions, environments, and culture. My burnout wasn’t just about being “too sensitive,” it was about navigating work systems that undervalued me, co-parenting systems still entangled with harm, and cultural systems that side-eye mothers into silence or performative posturing. As I mapped my emotional patterns, I also began mapping those systemic forces. The moon cycles gave me rhythm, but the therapy lens and regular sessions with my psychologist gave me context.

Finally, narrative therapy’s roots in social constructivism helped me realise something quietly revolutionary: the dominant story is not my only story. What I had internalised as failure; “too much,” “not resilient,” “naïve and gullible”, was not the only truth. It was one story. One I had inherited from family, institutions, media, and systems. And because it was a story, it could be challenged, deconstructed, and rewritten.

My moon boards didn’t replace traditional therapy, but they let me reclaim authorship. They let me say: I get to decide what this collage means. I get to choose the symbols. I get to tell this story in my language, not just yours.

The tool I used for most of the boards was Miro; a digital whiteboard platform typically used for corporate brainstorming or project mapping. But for me, it became something else entirely: a limitless canvas. Unlike a physical journal, it never ran out of space. I could zoom in and out, nest ideas, cluster thoughts, drag and drop screenshots from my phone without needing to commit to a final shape.

That mattered a lot, because when your brain is moving fast, jumping between images, lyrics, memories, sensory flashes, you need something that can hold all of it without demanding a beginning, middle, and end. Miro became that holding space. A sandbox I could revisit over days or weeks, layering gifs, voice memos, messages, text boxes, colours, and photos until something emerged.

Sometimes the images came first, other times a lyric unlocked everything. I’d screenshot DMs or therapy notes, drop in symbolic references to film archetypes or tarot, or stack visuals in ways that mimicked the chaos I was feeling, not necessarily to express it, but to externalise it. The board became a mirror, a container and a ritual. It was a way to witness myself in motion, without needing to narrate the difficult parts out loud.

There were no expectations. No formatting rules. No templates. Just rhythm and response. The platform didn’t fix anything on its own, but it gave me a visual, spacious, non-linear way to think through experiences that felt too big to articulate. It became a container for what I believe is neurodivergent narrative therapy.

Traditional therapy often assumes a neurotypical pace and structure; talk in sentences, reflect in journals, track your mood with words. But what if your brain doesn’t process experience in language-first ways?

What if emotion floods in before thought? What if words feel jagged, slow, or misread? What if images and music speak more clearly?

For me, that was the dissonance. I didn’t want to talk about the pain yet. I wanted to map it. Move it. See it, and then maybe articulate it once I’d processed it. I’ve always had a kind of sensory cross-wiring, not formally diagnosed with synesthesia, but something close. Music becomes colour. Colour triggers memory. Memory splinters into images. It’s never been linear, and for years I thought that meant I was doing healing “wrong,” so had given up on trying.

But in retrospect, the moon boards weren’t just creative output. They were a form of embodied translation. A way to take overwhelming internal states and express them through the visual syntax of layering, symbol, symmetry, repetition and interruption.

This makes sense through a neurodiversity-affirming lens. Many neurodivergent individuals often process the world through pattern recognition, metaphor, and sensory integration. Our nervous systems are tuned to pick up on subtleties, tone shifts, micro-gestures and emotional static that others might miss, but we often struggle to explain that awareness in neat paragraphs, and in my case, even less so with words spoken to someone else.

The moon boards allowed me to bypass that pressure. I could hold conflicting truths in one frame. I could make space for the unspeakable. I could collage my way into coherence.

I’m not sure if this kind of visual narrative work is regularly offered in clinical settings outside of Art Therapy, but maybe it should be. Because what I learned, through practice, not theory, is that healing doesn’t always mean a lightbulb moment in talk therapy. Sometimes it looks like a Miro board named after full moons, glowing with text and image and song and shadows. Sometimes it looks like reclaiming the language your body already knows.

And maybe the most radical part is this: I stopped trying to prove I was getting better. I listened to my psychologist who encouraged me to listen to the version of me who already knew what better felt like.

So no, I don’t have a single story to tell. I have 12 moon boards of nonlinear healing. I have symbols, songs, fragments, and visual maps that might not make sense to anyone else, until they do. And that, for me, is enough.

Healing didn’t mean fixing the chaos or wrapping it in a bow, it meant refusing to be erased or silenced by it. To that family member who called it red-string madness: just because you didn’t understand it, and I lacked the words to explain, doesn’t mean I was unravelling. It means I was narrating, differently. And sometimes, that’s exactly what survival looks like.