Narrative Therapy

On This Page...

What is Narrative Therapy?

There are lots of ways for us to work together, and will always be led by your needs and preferences. Narrative Therapy is one of the main frames I use when working with people, because I believe in its core principal:

"The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem" - Michael White

I think there are plenty of forces in our lives that want to convince us that we’re the problem, and that we need to be fixed by changing who we are into what those forces want us to be. I’m also done with believing that. Narrative Therapy is one way to explore alternate ways of being, and better understand our own values and motivations. It’s not the only one though, so I’ve also included some other therapy styles I draw from.

Narrative therapy is about questioning the stories we’ve been told as the Dominant Truth, and exploring new stories that shed light on hidden strengths, highlight our values, and empower us. It believes that there’s more than one way to understand our experience, and how we do that can have a serious impact on our emotions, the choices we make, and how we perceive our reality. It also gives us a chance to question the origin of a story- who’s telling it, why are they telling it, and what’s being left out?

How does it work?

Like most counselling styles, we can use Narrative Therapy in bits and pieces when it feels useful, or we can deep-dive into it and try to use it as the dominant framework to explore an issue. I do a bit of both, depending on what seems appropriate. Here are some of the Narrative Concepts I use the most.

Externalisation

Externalisation looks at the parts of you causing problems, and questions whether they’re parts of you at all. It’s about noticing the things you say and think about yourself and wondering why you think the bad things are in you, instead of happening to you.

Deconstructing Dominant Narratives

There are stories about the world that we trust to be true. These are our dominant narratives. But what made us decide they were true? Were they the most logical story? The story that gave the simplest answer? The story we told ourself? Or the story told by someone we trust? Whatever the origin, we deconstruct the story to look at why we trust it, what the impact of trusting it is on our wellbeing, and whether it’s time to turn down the volume on that particular version of events.

Unique Outcomes

How do we deconstruct dominant narratives? We look for their exceptions. You’d be amazed at how many there are, that we forget, ignore, and sweep under the rug because they don’t fit our expectations. So Narrative Therapy seeks out the moments where the dominant narrative doesn’t fit, and highlights our moments of resilience, strength, and hope.

Collective and Cultural Context

Narrative Therapy is big on the impact of collective and cultural narratives, and on prioritising voices that have been supressed. We look at intersectionality: the exploration of how stories about identity, gender, race, class and other aspects all mix and butt heads and intersect to impact our expereince.

These are just a few of my favourite parts of Narrative Therapy, but are hardly scratching the surface. There’s so much to play with!

How does it help: Anecdote Time!

I was lazy in high school. That’s what all the teachers said. That was the dominant narrative about me. Lazy and wasting my potential. I believed it, too. But now that I look back, I have to ask myself: what kind of lazy person carries a novel and a back-up emergency novel in their bag? I wasn’t too lazy to read. I wasn’t too lazy to write thousands of words of bad fanfiction and so-so teen poetry, or to start art projects every other week. So maybe the dominant narrative didn’t provide a full picture.

When I started to look at myself as someone who wasn’t lazy at school, I could ask myself why I did the things I did. I didn’t do homework because I struggled to sit still or focus on work I found boring. But when I found something interesting, I could sit and do it for 12 hours without breaks. The problem wasn’t me, it was my access to things that interested me. Likewise, I hated participating in PE and sports, but I loved to go for long walks, swim, and even tried the gym. Turns out I wasn’t too lazy to exercise but hated being bullied by peers and don’t enjoy competitive activities.

That's a pretty clear-cut example, but it shows how my self-hatred was directly tied to the stories teachers told me about myself, that became my dominant narrative. I spent years believing I was useless and hated exercise. It meant I never tried the things that interested me, because I knew I’d fail.

Changing my narrative to “I’m not good at things that bore me, but am great at the things I love” gave me a chance to try things and see myself succeed.

What stories do you tell yourself about your limitations? Where did they come from?