Narrative Therapy was pioneered in the 1980s by two therapists based in Adelaide, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand. It is grounded in the idea that we create stories in our minds about ourselves – linking up experiences and giving them meaning. Sometimes these stories can be distressing, disempowering or even toxic to our well-being (and when we chase them to their origin, we might discover that we have somehow been given them by others; parents, partners, school, work or society). A Narrative therapist will work to help you find different stories; ones grounded in your worth, inner resource or resilience. The evidence that these are available to us can be swamped by the negativity of the loud, undermining stories that we have become used to; your therapist will support you to quieten these and to discover new ways of understanding your life. As you do this, they will help you to bring texture and detail to those new stories, strengthening them as a tool with which to move forward.

At the heart of Narrative Therapy is the notion that the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem. You might for example have been brought up to believe that you are an ‘anxious person’ – a Narrative take on this would be to suggest that you are a person dealing with a problem of anxiety. You might be holding a feeling of inner worthlessness or of not deserving a loving relationship – a Narrative therapist might invite you to see it differently; that you are someone dealing with a problem of worthlessness. You might be hating yourself because you are over-eating or restricting your food. Your therapist may encourage you to see that you are dealing with a problem of wanting to eat too much or too little.

Separating ourselves from the problem like this says that the problem isn’t you. This can be liberating in helping to put you in touch with what you need to move through your distress. The approach can also give you space to look at problems from a mental distance and to see them for what they really are, providing the chance to find a new, richer story based on your inner value, strengths and potential.

Though the approach is widely used to help all kinds of people, Narrative Therapy is also concerned with social justice. People who have faced bigotry or discrimination often have to fight hard to avoid the negative attitudes of others from sinking into them and embedding as shame or self-hate in their own stories. Narrative Therapists aim to make visible the sources of this oppression (from family or society perhaps), helping the people they work with to externalise them and to remove them from the story they tell themselves.

 

Find out more here:
https://positivepsychology.com/narrative-therapy/

https://narrativetherapycentre.com/about/

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