Narrative Therapy

Feeling limited by your story?

Narrative Therapy invites us to look closely at the stories we’ve been telling about ourselves—the ones shaped by pain, pressure, or long histories. These stories may be true, but they’re rarely the whole truth.

“Narrative therapy can help people experience some of the alternative story lines that already exist in their lives that have been overshadowed or forgotten—stories with themes and plots that are in line with more empowering, more satisfying, more hope-filled futures.” — Jill Freedman and Gene Combs

These stories—of strength, creativity, connection—are already there, living in the corners of our experience. When they’re remembered and re-experienced, people often reconnect with parts of themselves they’d lost sight of: their knowledge, their values, their resilience. It can be a profound relief to discover that the story doesn’t have to end where the pain began.

Externalizing

Often, when people come to therapy, people’s problems start feeling like a part of their identity.

My anxiety. My depression. My PTSD. My ADHD. There is something wrong with me. I’m broken.

Narrative Therapists are interested in separating a person’s identity from the problem they have been experiencing. This requires a shift in language when talking about the problem. It is also a shift in attitude and orientation toward a person’s skills, knowledge, values and relationships that persist outside of the problem.

Externalizing “I’m a worrier,” sounds like, “the Worry keeps me from sleeping. ” This creates an opening for a person to relate to themselves as separate from the problem. Problems begin to feel less fixed and less restricting when spoken of in an externalized way. Skills, abilities, interests, competencies and commitments become more visible when people are separated from their problems. Externalizing conversations can begin to disempower the effects of labeling, pathologizing, and diagnosing. The open possibilities for people to describe themselves, their lives and relationships, from a new and non-problem saturated position. (Morgan 2000, p. 40)

Changing the Relationship to the Problem

Exploring the effects of the problem

Deconstructing social beliefs, ideas, and practices that serve to the problematic story

Discovering unique outcomes

Re-Authoring

A few important assumptions of the narrative post-structuralist worldview established by Michael White and David Epston:

• We become who we are through relationships and through the meaning we make of our perceptions of each other.

• We organize our lives through stories.

• We can make many different stories or meanings of any particular event.

• There are many experiences in each of our lives that have not been “storied.” Each of those events could, if storied, lead to a different, often preferable, life narrative.

• People are separate from problems. The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.

  *credited to Jill Freeman and Gene Combs

How is Narrative different?

Most mental health conversations are had through the framing of a medical model or structuralist world view. Narrative Therapy is derived from post-structuralist world view. Here are a few examples of how the differ.

Structuralist View Post-Structuralist View

Seeks to classify people in terms of general types or classes. Seek specific details of people’s identity

Expert knowledge is valued and experts have the power to define people’s identities. Local knowledge is valued. People have the power to define themselves based on their

own knowledge.