Beginner’s Guide to Narrative Therapy
If you are new to therapy, or researching the various approaches that different therapists use, you may stumble upon this lesser-known modality called narrative therapy.
This is a brief guide to narrative therapy that outlines the philosophy behind the approach, the narrative therapy process, and what narrative therapy is typically used for to help you decide if narrative therapy is the right approach for you.
Narrative therapy philosophy
The narrative approach to counselling can best be encapsulated by this famous quote from one of its founders, Michael White:
“The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.”
The idea that “the person is not the problem” is foremost an ethical stance. In the world of psychology, people are often pathologized for their struggles; narrative therapy, on the other hand, posits that people have rich, multidimensional identities of which their problems are only a small part. However, by the time people come to therapy, it feels like these problems aren’t merely a small part of one’s life at all! It can feel like you are being completely strangled and have lost sight of any way out.
In the language of narrative therapy, it is said that people come to therapy when a “problem-saturated story” about their lives is dominating and overshadowing all other possible stories the person could have about their life. The goal of narrative therapy is thus not to “cure” so-called psychological problems, but to disrupt their hegemonic power over people’s lives and most importantly, over how they view themselves.
The narrative approach to counselling also recognizes that the stories people tell about their lives and problems are inherently shaped by societal, historical and political forces.
The narrative therapy process examines how systems of power in society reinforce not only certain problems, but certain “problem-saturated identities”. Narrative therapy in practice works to “deconstruct” and unsettle these dominant societal discourses and make space for people to reclaim their own voices, beliefs and values. For this reason, narrative therapy is often a favoured approach for those who have been marginalized or minoritized in any way, and also for those who have been entrenched in the medical or psychiatric system.
Narrative therapy processes
Narrative therapy believes that people are in relationship with problems, and that people have the agency, wisdom and abilities to revise and reauthor their relationship with the problems that bring them to therapy. For example, in narrative therapy we move away from the idea that you have depression, or that you are “an addict”, and instead we explore your relationship to depression, your relationship to substances. This in itself can be relieving for people as internalizing a problem-saturated identity (“I’m a depressive”; or “I’m an addict”) can bring shame and delimit a person’s sense of the possibilities for their life. This technique of seeing problems as separate from people and exploring people’s relationships to problems is called externalizing. Externalizing is not a one-time intervention, but an ongoing stance that helps clients get a sense of space and distance from their struggles. That space also allows people to discover or recover their abilities, skills, talents, and wisdom so that they may reclaim their lives from a dominating problem story and begin to live out a story that aligns with their values, hopes and dreams.
Uses for narrative therapy
Narrative therapy approaches can be used for any possible struggle that people bring to therapy: depression, anxiety, OCD, addictions, trauma, relationship issues, questions about sexual orientation or gender identity, etc. This is because narrative therapy is less concerned with purported causes, symptoms and generalizations about what the best ‘treatment’ is, and it is far more concerned with your unique experiences. Narrative therapy believes that you are the expert of you; the role of the narrative therapist is to provide you the scaffolding to create the life that you want: your preferred story for your life.
Narrative therapy is as diverse as are the practitioners trained in it. Some practitioners solely practice narrative therapy, while the majority integrate narrative therapy with other modalities. This brief guide is by no means an extensive history or summary of this approach.
If you are interested to learn more about the narrative therapy approach, or want to give it a try, feel free to reach out to our counsellors in Vancouver and Montreal who are ready to answer your questions about how narrative therapy might help you.