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
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:
The Goal Of Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy does not seek to change a person. Rather, it aims to change the effects that a problem has on a person. The goal of exploring someone’s story and challenging that storyline in therapy is to make space between a person and their issue. This approach makes it possible to decipher what narratives are helpful to believe and which ones are harmful.
Who Narrative Therapy Is Right For
Narrative therapy can be useful for anyone who feels overwhelmed by negative things they have experienced, negative thoughts, or negative feelings. Narrative therapy allows people to find their voice and begin to use it in a constructive way.
Although Narrative therapy is a newer modality that is still being researched, it has been deemed useful in treating several disorders including anxiety, depression, attachment issues, ADHD, eating disorders, PTSD and adjustment disorders.
This type of therapy might not always be a good fit for Individuals with personality disorders, or people with active paranoia or psychosis depending on the severity of their disorder. Going too deeply into ideas relating to someone’s worldview who is experiencing delusions or a severe personality disorder could be too unstructured for some individuals.
How Narrative Therapy Is Unique
Several therapies offer very structured approaches that have targeted goals to work on, and distinct processes that allow the therapeutic relationship to flourish. In this dynamic, the individual receiving treatment is treated as the expert of their own lives, and the therapist is merely helping them explore that. This allows the individual to feel a larger sense of ownership throughout the process, which can help them build a sense of autonomy and independence. This form of therapy has no set time-frame. It can be very brief or very long depending on what the individual feels they need.
Something unique about this modality is the support element. It is encouraged for individuals to journal or write letters throughout the week that they share with their therapist in between sessions or during sessions, so that the therapist can see how the individual is processing problems and experiences. The therapist might also invite outside support such as family or significant others to participate in the therapeutic process, in order to help the individual understand their situation through the lens of the therapist as well as the significant relationships they have.
