NARRATIVE THERAPY
What is your story?
Have you ever been asked that question before? Often our answer to this question will come with a lot of mixed emotions. Depending on how we view ourselves, we might answer this question by relaying a series of negative experiences that have happened to us over our lifetime. Or, some of us may avoid the negative and only divulge our greatest accomplishments. Either way, we are complex beings who have real and meaningful stories that cannot be summarized into this one question.
Our identity is formed through what we experience.
Our experiences tell us who we are as we discover ourselves and the world around us.
This process begins before we can even talk. As infants, we rely on our experiences and the world around us to give meaning to our lives. For example, if our mom feeds us, rocks us, and speaks to us, we learn that our mom is someone who nurtures us. If our dad points to an object and says it is a ball, we can then give meaning to that object by calling it a ball, because our brains are wired to create language through our experiences.
As we grow older, we develop deeper meanings through our experiences.
If we have a lot of friends at school growing up, we might believe things like “I’m fun to be around” or “people like me.” If we are not learning as fast as other students in school, we might start to believe things like “I’m stupid” or “I’ll never understand these things.” These beliefs about ourselves continue to form as we go through life and turn into narratives that we have about our own lives.
Many stories we form out of our experiences are useful in finding solutions and learning valuable skills as we go through life. However, sometimes the way we see our experiences can also be harmful to us by leading us to have negative views about ourselves or others.
When we are the only ones who are analyzing our own experiences and perspectives, it is often impossible for us to see our own problems with clarity because we have so many feelings tied into these experiences.
How can Narrative Therapy help?
Narrative therapists can help by giving us a safe space to explore our own perspectives about our experiences. A Narrative therapist believes that we are the experts of our lives and treat us as such. The therapist’s role in this type of therapy is to seek an understanding of our lives and our worldview, separate us from our problems enough to look at the problems together, and offer new perspectives to help us understand ourselves even better. This process is broken down into four steps:
Steps of Narrative Therapy:
Understanding the Narrative:
What are the stories we are telling ourselves about our experiences?
Focus on the effect of the problem:
How are the things going on in our lives currently impacting us?
Externalizing the problem:
How can we separate our identity from what is currently happening in our lives?
Family Support
Who can support us throughout this process?
Narrative Therapy Goals:
Deconstruct our problems
Help us understand our beliefs about our problems
Help us rewrite our narratives and how we understand our problems
Assist us in facilitating change in our lives
Help us reconstruct our identity
- Narrative Therapy Explained
- The Goal Of Narrative Therapy
- Who Narrative Therapy Is Right For
- How Narrative Therapy Is Unique
Narrative therapy enables us to deconstruct what is currently happening in our lives by offering us a safe and unbiased person to explore it with. A Narrative therapist can help us analyze all of the pieces of what brought us to who we are today. The therapist can begin to find emerging themes in how we have handled experiences in the past, what we believe about ourselves and others, and what has led up to the problems we are currently experiencing. A therapist operating from this narrative therapy framework will often implement the following goals as a means to discover with us who we are now and who we want to be:
