What is Retold?

Retold is a phone/web application designed to guide you through a self-dialogue technique, an intuitive perspective swapping tool embedded within an AI-assisted virtual environment. This perspective swapping self-dialogue technique allows users to develop the mind's innate ability to see situations in a new perspective: an ability sometimes termed reflexive function (Fonagy & Target 1996), metacognitive or metarepresentative skills (Sperber 2000; Semerari et al. 2003), or the observing-I (Leiman & Stiles 2001). The structure and therapeutic function of the app is based on theories and practices from internal family systems, dialogical self theory, narrative therapy, Jungian/Neo-Jungian theories, depth psychology, motivational interviewing, relational psychoanalysis, as well as some of the new relational movements such as Circling and Dialogos.

Think of Retold as a guide that helps you explore and navigate your inner world. You will be able to talk through your problems, stuck places, inner and outer conflicts, as well as difficult life decisions. After you talk through these inner/outer conflicts with an AI Guide, a persona representing the conflict will generate in the game and you will be able to engage in a dialogue with them. The dialogue will allow you to talk to the problem as if it were a separate person in the external the world. As you engage in this dialogical process with the personified part of your conflict, you will gain a perspective on the inner/outer conflict that would otherwise be inaccessible to you. This new perspective will allow you to resolve these stuck places within you and re-integrate them back into your life story.

Every time we remember something, rather than playing the memory back as if it were a tape recorder, we are actually reconstructing it! In this way, our life is constantly being retold whether we are aware of it or not, and Retold will help you tell your story consciously. So if we are always in the process of telling the story of our life, why not tell one worth living?