Narrative Therapy: A Quick Method That Transforms Your Life
Haven’t you ever wished you could completely rewrite your story? Did you know that it is possible? And you don’t have to make such drastic changes, or travel back in time. Narrative therapy will teach you how.
From psychotherapy there are many ways to target a problem, disorder or crisis situation; One of them is to see our life as a set of stories that we tell ourselves daily and that thus predispose our mental state (our emotions, thoughts, reactions to different circumstances). It’s not you, it’s the stories you tell yourself.
The same thing happens every day in our minds as in a movie. We tell each other a lot of stories. They can be short and simple or long and complex, they can be drama, comedy, action or horror. With the particularity that We have not identified them as stories or movies, we believe them to be real.
Take the success story as an example. They began to tell you the story of success in school, when they told you that you must work hard to get good grades, because if you don’t get good grades you can’t get into university, or you won’t get a good job and you won’t win the job. enough money. The happy ending to the success story is then: a stable job, a high position in an important company and making a lot of money. If you don’t meet that goal, it will always be because you haven’t tried hard enough.
Many people are telling themselves this story and it has helped them achieve their goals. However, I meet some who still feel lost, tired and insufficient. Despite following the rules of the success story, they do not feel very successful.
I took this example because the history of success is currently being rewritten, and in the last 10 years our view of success has changed a lot. If before success was making money and being able to buy symbols of prestige (private vehicles, fashion, international travel, the latest technologies…), today success is having free time, a stable relationship, a group of very good friends and health.
Your problems change when you change your stories
How much would your current “problems” change if you started telling yourself another story about what success is? The same thing happens with relationships and marriages.
For example, we still associate divorce directly with failure, because the happy ending that “death separates us” could not be achieved. So, anyone who has not reached this point in her marriage has failed in her love story.
But what would happen if we told ourselves another story about divorce and the end of a relationship? Instead of saying “despite all our efforts and attempts we were unable to stay together and overcome our differences,” we could say “we had the courage to decide on marriage, but after a time, which has taught us a lot, we want to move forward and “Now we have the courage to be honest and admit that we need a change in our lives. Then divorce stops being a war story that ends with the world in ashes from which each one must start from 0, but instead becomes a new starting point for both sides.
What is success and what is failure for you? What are your success and failure stories? Maybe what you just want is to reach the happy ending of a story that, at this point in your life, no longer makes much sense.
How does that work in therapy?
Most people who go to therapy come with a very particular story. Many times they are very painful stories, and The intention of narrative therapy is not to deny suffering. Suffering in the moment is real, the stories that produce it do not necessarily have to be.
Let’s say that a person goes to therapy because they don’t know very well what to do with their life, they have always tried to follow “the instructions”, but they feel that nothing is going well for them, they do a lot for others, but end up losing, they are afraid of make a mistake again and feel stuck. As a result She doesn’t sleep well, feels depressed, enjoys things less and less and falls into a spiral of meaninglessness. During therapeutic dialogues he shares his “stories”:
Those are the meaningful stories for this person, and they make you try to fight against them all your life. Maybe you are afraid of being a nuisance and that is why you always wait for others to tell you what they want and what they prefer, so as not to bother them with your own insignificant needs, or you don’t like calling others on the phone, because you don’t want to bother them. So you focus a lot of energy on controlling your behavior with others, because you are afraid of doing something inappropriate. In the end he does a lot to cover up his supposed “disadvantages” and very little to apply his strengths and all just to tell himself that story of “being a nuisance.”
The challenge is to know the stories of possibilities
By knowing a person’s dominant background and stories, we can now jointly know and construct other stories. It is not about inventing a world of fantasies, but about changing the focus of attention which is about the deficit, and move it towards resources and towards other realities.
The client in my example saw that he was a nuisance since he was little, because this was the story his parents told him. But here is another story (more real): What would change if we say that the parents of the consultant were simply very busy people with little sensitivity to the needs of a child and in their stress and indisposition they told him that he was the problem (be careful : children always think they are the problem)?
And the new story would be: “I was not the problem, I was a child with needs and my parents did not organize their priorities well enough to take care of me. I am not a nuisance, I am a person with needs.”
As you can see, completely changes the script. With that story the consultant may suddenly be curious about his needs, he may say to himself:
“I have the right to demand things for myself too.”
“I want to know what I want to do.”
“I can ask, doubt, oppose what others tell me.”
Thus, the person takes a new role in their situation, she realizes that she has influence over her problems and can change the narrative herself.
Related article: “10 daily habits that improve your emotional balance”
Everything can be questioned
There are many things in our minds that we believe to be true: about ourselves, about other people, about the world, the future, etc. The only truth is that everything can be questioned. We can tell ourselves totally different stories about the same life. Stories of possibilities, highlighting our achievements, personal values, rights and priorities.
We all have these alternative stories; Finding them yourself is not so easy, but once they were discovered, it is difficult to ignore them. Narrative therapy is based on the premise that stories form and transform us. When the story changes, the problem changes and we can choose which stories we want to believe. Therapy doesn’t have to be a long process, and changing the narrative of a few stories can be enough for many people.
