What is Narrative Therapy?
Whether you’re perusing PsychologyToday profiles or viewing different therapist’s websites, including mine, you’ll come across different treatment approaches listed. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, and Existential Therapy are just a few that you may come across in your search. While I do use these regularly in sessions with my clients, I primarily view my work through the lens of Narrative Therapy. So lets walk through exactly what that means!
You’re the Expert of Your Story
During my graduate program, professors urged us to pick an approach to specialize in so that we always had tools in our toolbox to come back to - no matter who walked in our office. I found myself drawn to very structured approaches that eased some of the anxiety I was facing about seeing clients for the very first time. I can remember vividly that during my first session using this structured approach, I felt like I was trying to fit my client’s experience into a box that just didn’t fit. It wasn’t my style! I immediately decided that I needed to go back to the drawing board and find an approach that allowed for my client’s story to be the priority. Enter Narrative Therapy.
The approach of Narrative Therapy allows for you, the client, to be the expert of your story and your life. Although I may have years of training and experience in my field, I would never claim to know what’s best for you or how you want to live your life. I believe you are capable of being the author of your own story, and it’s my job to collaborate with you in session so that you feel you can pick up the pen to write or re-write it.
The Problem is the Problem, the Person is not the Problem
Not only does Narrative Therapy put you in charge of your own story, it serves to separate the problems you are experiencing from your identity. In session, we work together to understand the problem and your relationship with it. By doing this, we hope to externalize the problem and view it as it’s own entity, understand what strengthens, weakens, and influences your relationship with it, how the problem serves you, and what life might look like if your relationship with the problem wasn’t around.
Strength-Focused
When we separate the problem from who you are, we can identify times that the problem wasn’t as prominent in your life. Sometimes that problem story takes over and we forget about the exceptions when your life or relationship looked more like the way you wanted it to - and the role you played in making it that way. In session, we’ll work to re-remember experiences in your life so that the problem isn’t the main character, you are. A main tenet of Narrative Therapy is that you get to construct the meaning of your experiences. When you take over the role of storyteller, you get to re-write your experiences with your strengths and capabilities in mind.
Future Focused
Although we may spend some time exploring and re-writing your past experiences, our overall focus is how you want your life to look in the future. We might spend some time imagining what your life would look like if the problem wasn’t the main character in your story. Your re-written past experiences will serves as examples of this. We also might try out some new language and self-talk that would fit better with that preferred life story. All of this creates change that brings us onto the path you want and bridges the gap between what you want your life to look like and how it looks now.
A New Set of Lenses
A very simple way to sum up Narrative Therapy is to use the analogy of glasses. Let’s say over the course of life we view our surroundings through a pair of glasses. It seems really clear until we get a scratch on the lens and now everything we’re looking at is a little off. Somehow one scratch our whole field of vision. What worked for us before, helps us see only a little now, but overall isn’t working out for us. So we make an appointment to trade in our lenses for a pair that isn’t scratched. With the new pair we can view our surroundings totally clearly now because we made the switch.
The problem in our life is the scratch on the lens - it could be one or a few experiences in our life that begin to affect our whole life story. Starting therapy is our appointment to trade those lenses in - we’ve realized that the life we’re living no longer is working for us and we need to make a change. Taking over the role of author of your story and re-writing your experiences to match the way you want your life to look is the start to viewing your life clearly through a new lens.
If you have questions about getting started, check out the FAQs, the blog How to Get Started in Counseling, or contact me for a free consultation!
Tina Leboffe, MA, LPC, NCC, AAC
*Please note that this blog is for your information only and does not constitute clinical advice or establish a client-counselor relationship.
Citation: Madigan, S. (2011). Narrative therapy. American Psychological Association.