Obituary for Victoria C. Dickerson

Abstract

Victoria (Vicki) C. Dickerson, Ph.D. died peacefully of a progressive illness at her home in Aptos, California, April 3, 2024, under hospice care, with loved ones by her side. She died as she had lived, fully in charge. She chose to use California's End of Life Option Act (EOLOA), also known as death with dignity process. Despite limited energy, she managed to contact many of her dearest family and friends in the days before she died to let them know of her failing health and imminent death. Despite how ill she was, her voice and clarity remained strong.

Vicki was born June 30, 1939, near Lincoln, Nebraska and grew up in Boise, Idaho, the eldest of three daughters to Violet and Harold Dickerson. She excelled at her Catholic schools and got a scholarship to a Catholic College after her father died when she was 15 and money was scarce. She double majored in chemistry and an integrated history/philosophy/literature course, going on for a master's degree in chemistry at the University of Notre Dame. She taught high school chemistry before finishing her Ph.D. in 1987 and launching a career as a clinical psychologist. It was in those years as a teacher that she realized she had a knack for reaching out to young people, who trusted her with their concerns. She decided that counseling not chemistry was her calling.

Vicki was clear that her Catholic upbringing and schooling focused her on the importance of community, relationships, and the interconnectedness of all beings. As she wrote in one of her papers, “Growing up Catholic introduced me to the notion of the ‘Mystical Body,’ which, when separated from the religious aspect, helped me understand the wholeness of the universe and of all beings as somehow connected.” (Dickerson, 2024, p. 5). This background prepared the way for what she has called a “conversion experience” when she heard Michael White, an Australian therapist, speak at a two-day workshop in 1988. The ideas she was exposed to in those 2 days led to decades of learning and collaborations with therapists from all over the world who were similarly “converted” to the theoretical paradigm that influenced Michael White: postmodernism. In a number of articles written for professional journals, Vicki traced her path from structural to systemic to poststructural therapies, staying within the narrative therapy community from 1988 onward (Dickerson, 2010, 2014).

One of her earliest collaborations, with Jeff Zimmerman, started in 1985 when both attended a 3-week externship program at the Family Therapy Program at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, a program headed by Karl Tomm. Neither she nor Jeff knew that Karl Tomm would be out of town during their externship and that they would be studying instead with co-directors, Evan Imber-Black and Gary Saunders, with whom she also maintained lifetime connections. She and Jeff eventually opened the Bay Area Family Therapy Training Associates (BAFTTA) in 1989. In 1992, Jeff and Vicki published the first article that appeared in the journal Family Process on narrative therapy entitled: “Families with adolescents: Escaping problem lifestyles” (Dickerson & Zimmerman, 1992). This was a career milestone of which Vicki was very proud. Jeff and Vicki's collaboration lasted for many years, including presenting workshops, and publishing many articles and book chapters, culminating in their book If Problems Talked: Narrative Therapy in Action (Zimmerman & Dickerson, 1996).

Early collaborations with other narrative therapists flourished in the 1990s when the number of narrative therapists in North America was still so few that most knew each other and had taken workshops with Michael White, David Epston, and each other; presented at narrative conferences and published together. Among early narrative colleagues Vicki included Jill Freedman, Gene Combs, Melissa Elliott, and James “Griff” Griffith, Janet Adams-Westcott, Stephen Madigan, Kaethe Weingarten, and Sallyann Roth.

By the end of the decade, international professional and friendship connections flourished. In 1999, Vicki went to the 1st International Narrative Conference in Adelaide, Australia and in 2000, she presented at the New Zealand Association of Counselors (NZAC) conference in Hamilton, at the University of Waikato. She met, and stayed in touch, with John Winslade, Gerald Monk, Wally McKenzie, Kathie Crocket, Dorothea Lewis, Aileen Cheshire, Johnella Bird, and Wendy Drewery. One of her favorite book chapters was written with Kathie Crocket, “El Tigre, El Tigre: A Story of Narrative Practice” in Al Gurman's Clinical Casebook of Couple Therapy (Dickerson & Crocket, 2010).

It is not easy to sustain friendships over thousands of miles, but Vicki was devoted to her friends and she did so. Vicki made international phone calls to her friends regularly and talked at length. Vicki was not funny, but she had a great sense of humor and many of her friends remarked often how much fun it was to get Vicki to laugh. She had a great laugh and was, in fact, laughing right up until the end. Hours before she died, she told this anecdote on herself, laughing: “The guy who runs the local grocery store is wonderful. He will do anything for me. He came in today and started to bawl and I said, ‘George, no tears!’ so he turned his back and walked away. I had to yell at him: ‘Come back!’ So, he did.”

In the 1990s, Vicki, Stephen Madigan, Bill Lax, and Jeff Zimmerman embarked on two ventures that did well for a while and then as times changed, ended up not flourishing. Both were wonderful ideas. The first, Narrative on Tour, was intended to bring narrative ideas across the country to therapists who were unlikely to go to narrative conferences, especially those in Vancouver, Canada. This venture, with four clinicians, turned out to be too costly for many venues to afford. The second, which Stephen Madigan named planet-therapy.com was an early web based portal to learn narrative therapy. As with many start-ups, funding was never adequate to fully support the effort.

In 1992, Vicki joined the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA), which became an important professional home for the rest of her life. Early in her association with AFTA she formed an important friendship with Rachel Hare-Mustin, that lasted until Rachel's death in 2020. Her contributions early on were recognized and she chaired a controversial program in 1996, remaining friends with all of the presenters. She served on, or was the Chair of, numerous AFTA committees, was Vice-President of AFTA 2007–2009, President from 2017 to 2019, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. As AFTA president, she helped organize two outstanding conferences, one in 2018 chaired by Justine D'Arrigo-Patrick and one in 2019 chaired by Pilar Hernandez-Wolfe.

Vicki was enormously committed to mentoring young people, both in her teaching position at San Jose State University (2005–2012), where she was an adjunct associate professor in the graduate clinical psychology program and with younger therapists eager to learn with her. Many young therapists felt singled out and encouraged by Vicki as having something special to teach and write. She used her position within AFTA to promote younger therapists.

Perhaps her most significant relationship with a younger person was her lifelong and devoted relationship with her goddaughter, Brandy Hyer—and now Brandy's wife, Krista. Vicki could never say enough about how wonderful Brandy was; indeed she was extolling Brandy's virtues on the phone to callers just hours before her death! Brandy introduced Vicki to Transcendental Meditation (TM) in 2009 and this became a daily practice for her. A particular delight for Vicki was visiting Brandy and Krista in Fairfield, Iowa to help Brandy with her dissertation. This work eventually spread out over a year and Vicki couldn't have been prouder when she learned that Brandy was awarded the distinction of having the best dissertation in her program for 2020.

The decade of the aughts was a time when Vicki published articles and chapters on her own. The title of her book Who Cares What You're Supposed to Do: Breaking the Rules to Get What You Want in Love, Life, and Work speaks to an enduring quality of hers that she shared in this book for a popular audience (Dickerson & Fine, 2004). Comfortable breaking the rules, Vicki did so with kindness and finesse. After the untimely and tragic death of Michael White in 2008, she pushed back on speculation that his death would mark the end of narrative therapy by successfully proposing and shepherding a special section in Family Process honoring Michael White and his legacy (Dickerson, 2009).

Always a lifelong learner and always happy to push boundaries, if politely, in 2012 Vicki accepted a new position created by Jay Lebow, the editor of Family Process from 2012 to 2023, to be the Associate Editor for New Media; this was in 2012, when Facebook, You Tube, and Twitter were newly becoming media giants. She created accounts in all three sites and began the process of making the journal known through social media. She held that position for 2 years and then transitioned to Social Media/Communications Strategist and acted in that position from 2014 to 2018.

As for so many others, the Covid pandemic put an end to Vicki's travel to see friends and colleagues, but she remained in touch over Zoom. She continued playing golf until the last few months of her life and invested more energy in her local neighborhood friendships. She also completed a paper that provides an overview of her life, from which this obituary is drawn (Dickerson, 2024). It does not have section headings named after the dogs she has lived with over her lifetime, although this was a perennial joke she made over the last 20 years about a hypothetical autobiography she would author. The conclusion of her paper is one that makes me incredibly happy: She writes that she looks back on her life with “joy and happiness” and that her life has been “fuller than [she] ever could have imagined.” Ours too, Vicki, because you were in it.