"Save the Cat!" Does Therapy

The tried and true rules of storytelling can shape the patient’s life narrative.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.

One way to think about therapy is that it rewrites the patient's narrative about who they are, how the world works, and what the point is. A good life story is both true—it believably accounts for the most salient events in the patient’s life—and uplifting. But it’s still a story. Thus, therapists and patients are well-advised to learn something about stories.

Save the Cat! was Blake Snyder’s (2005) guide for screenwriters to help them use the internal rules of story structure, a structure that unfolds over three acts. It was adapted for novel writing by Jessica Brody in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. In this post, I want to explore how it might be adapted to making life narratives more therapeutic.

The phrase “Save the Cat!” refers to the need to show the imperfect main character doing something heroic at the start of the story to make us root for them. In therapy, we accomplish this by framing the patient’s current problematic personality pattern as a former solution (Watzlawick et al., 1974). We help the depressive patient see how her self-abnegation once served an overtaxed family—or what she perceived as one. To address this in real time, her depressive passivity may also be seen as serving the overtaxed therapist—or her perception of such.

The anxious patient sees how his constant insecurity and his worrying gave the limited parents something to do that they knew how to do, something like reassurance. In real time, it also gives the actual or perceived limited therapist something they know how to do, namely, reassurance. These self-sacrifices are heroic.

Brody writes: “You’ll find a flawed hero—a hero with problems—in every great novel ever told,” a hero “desperately in need of transformation” (p.6). Some people think therapy is doing patients a favor if it defines them as perfect just the way they are: “You poor dear.” However, literature teaches us that the development of a compelling and redemptive narrative must begin with an agreement that the patient is flawed and needs to change.

Therapists call this a case formulation, and like Brody, therapists develop a case formulation with a specific goal in mind: a clear understanding of what stands in the way of the goal's achievement and “what the hero must learn/discover by the end." She even says that someone tells the hero in Act 1 what needs to change, which is what therapists do at the start of therapy.

In Act 2, the hero faces the reluctance to change, which happens in therapy when it’s clear what patients ought to do, but they don’t want to give up their old ways. Act 2 also introduces a “helper character” whose relationship with the hero is a vessel for transformation. Therapy depends on the patient becoming the main character in the therapy as a prelude to becoming the main character of their own life. Therapy also introduces the therapist as an important secondary character, partly to play out problematic patterns in real time, and partly to ensure that patients don’t become the only character in their lives.

Act 2 in all great stories ends with a “dark night of the soul,” where the hero is “worse off than at the start of the novel.” This stage is intrinsic to therapeutic growth. Patients relinquish old ways of doing things and, especially, old ways of evaluating progress and self-worth, and they feel lost on their new path. They had solidified a way of being in the world that pushed away uncertainty, insecurity, and angst, so when they give up the old way, they are flooded with these unpleasantries. In therapy, it’s a mistake to try to hurry this phase along and inadvertently promote a sense that nothing bad should ever be felt. Understanding the nature of story arcs can help avoid this mistake.

In Act 3, “the hero realizes what they must do to … fix themselves." Problems are resolved when the hero embraces and enacts their new way of being in the world. In therapy, change can happen quickly at the end, once patients try out in their actual lives the new relational paradigms they discovered with the therapist.

Most great stories end with some kind of callback to the way they started, where a similar situation is responded to differently. Many a successful therapy finds the patient recounting a familiar scene with a new outcome derived from the way the patient has changed.

Save the Cat! can be read as a prescription for writing a novel and therefore as a prescription for how a patient’s life narrative ought to unfold in therapy over time. That would be a mistake. Instead, Save the Cat! is a distillation of what great novels and screenplays have in common — a source of wisdom rather than instruction, calling for appreciative understanding rather than obedience. Save the Cat! relates to writing as philosophical or literary appreciation of the human condition relates to therapy. Like therapy narratives, great stories are educational, redemptive, and uplifting. Knowing the milestones of great stories can help patients and therapists stay on track to ensure that the therapy is educational, redemptive, and uplifting.

It’s well known that reading literature and attending literary theatrical and cinematic productions can educate therapists to recognize the patterns that occur in people’s lives. Literature can also help therapists learn the arc of narrative development to guide the life narrative along reliable lines that lead to personal growth.