Narrative Therapy: How Does Your Story Affect You?

The power of the word. How many times have we heard that phrase? Do we really know how important they are? Do we use words for us or against us? A simple word can change everything, sometimes even a comma is capable of changing the meaning of a sentence and the narrative

What is narrative therapy?

In the narrative therapy The basic foundation is that the patient, and not the therapist, is the expert in the story of his or her life and it is he who must tell it. Another of its main characteristics is to use the letters and stories written by the patient as a resource, not only to give the therapist more information, but as a form of therapy in itself.

Narrative therapy was developed by therapists Michael White and David Epston, who laid the main theoretical foundations that other professionals would later continue to develop. This style of therapy is born from postmodern philosophical thoughts that assumed that there are different ways of describing the same thing and also there is no single valid explanation

So much so that according to this narrative technique, we do not perceive reality as it is, we interact with our environment and build a story from our perspective. This type of therapy allows the patient to externalize the problem and see it as another element of the narrative, something separate from themselves, without identifying with it. The therapist, to achieve the above, must formulate questions that guide the narrative, thus acting as a facilitating agent.

Key Components of Narrative Therapy

There are different narrative media for therapeutic purposes with which psychologists can carry out narrative therapy. Still, all of these techniques are based on three main components.

• I respect: The people who participate in the narrative therapy or in this narrative technique they are always treated with respect. Since they should feel completely free to say how they see things and not be ashamed of it.
• Don’t blame yourself: The psychologist who runs this narrative therapy class With various techniques, he never blames the client for each of his actions. This approach focuses more on recognizing and changing unwanted stories about ourselves and others.
• The client as expert: The narrative technique and its narratives They focus mainly on the patient’s action. Therefore, psychologists act as guides during this process.

What is narrative therapy based on?

The central focus of the narrative therapy focuses primarily on the stories we develop within ourselves and carry out throughout our lives.

How we give a very personal meaning to our experiences, giving a main role to the emotions we feel in those moments. Therefore, both the narrative therapy and the techniques associated with it are based on these premises:

1. Reality is socially constructed: The way we relate to others directly affects how we experience reality. In this way, the experiences we have with our environment end up generating a perspective of each of the moments of our life
2. The influence of language: People interpret our experiences through language. So much so that depending on the way we think through language we can have different ways of interpreting the same event. That is, according to our internal dialogue we manufacture narratives different about the reality that surrounds us.
3. How we organize reality: Have a narrative about our memories and our history helps us organize reality. Even though we do not remember certain moments of our lives well, we often build a thread through the story that most convinces us. Therefore, we often have wrong thoughts about our past.
4. There is no objective reality: We are subjective beings. This narrative technique is based mainly on the fact that we cannot have a objective view of our experiences. So much so, that the same event is experienced differently by the different people who attend it.

How do we create our story?

The narrative therapy It suggests that we create our story throughout our lives as a way to make sense of all the experiences we have. Therefore, the fact of having a negative or positive speech affects both our past and our present and future.

Even though several stories exist at the same time, there is usually one story that we give more importance to. Some people have a dominant story that does not allow them to move forward in their life. In these cases, it is when the narrative therapy Together with a specialist psychologist, he does his job and allows us to change the perspective of this discourse.

There are a number of characteristics that make this story more important than the others and dominate your inner speech Among them we can find the following reasons:

• Thin Descriptions: Normally the dominant story that we have as the protagonist in our speech, is based on other people’s judgments instead of our own perception. In this way, if, for example, as young people we were once judged as lazy, this judgment can dominate our discourse. So much so that we will end up making this trait important in our story or the narrative of our life. These specific judgments are known as thin descriptions in narrative therapy.
• Confuse ourselves with our problems: Sometimes we give so much importance to a defect that we consider very present in our lives, that it ends up dominating. all narratives of our history. In this way, it is increasingly difficult for us to separate ourselves from our problems since our history is focused on it. In fact, we come to think that the problem is us.

We may not realize that we only look at the bad decisions or trials that they do to us. Therefore, it is vitally important not to dwell on the past and leave negative thoughts behind.

Narrative therapy exercises

There are different techniques or exercises to use narrative therapy to our advantage. These are used to help people heal and overcome a problematic history.

1. Reconstruct our narrative: One of the main things that is done in a narrative therapy is to help build the narrative anew. To do this, the essential thing is to explore our voice and see how we approach the events of our life through them. If we examine each of our speeches and the meanings we give them, we end up seeing how we give them a completely distorted perspective.
2. Outsourcing: When we use our voice to tell our story, we become observers of ourselves. Thanks to this new way of seeing problems, we end up distancing ourselves from them. This narrative technique is called externalization since it takes distance from some of our experiences.
3. Of construction: In the narrative therapy for children or adults one of the most used tools is deconstruction. In it, the person who performs it tries to obtain clarity in his story. Many times we see a problem in our life that takes center stage in a large part of our memories. Therefore, the deconstruction and segmentation of the parts of our memories end up solving this black cloud that hides reality.
4. Unique results: We believe that our narratives They cannot change since otherwise our organization or identity is lost. The reality is that our way of being goes far beyond a result in our experience. Therefore, exploring these results and discarding them can be a good technique to forget these details.

Each of these narrative techniques must be carried out by a professional psychologist. Through them we will be able to renew our past and make the future as we want.

How can narrative therapy help us?

The narrative therapy focuses primarily on dominant stories that are negative or problematic for moving forward with our lives. Narrative therapists help you explore these stories and look for information that can help us change our perspectives about the past.

It is through these narrative stories that we can begin to identify alternative stories that offer us the opportunity to explore other ways of seeing our past and present.

Exploring our memory in this way not only helps us know ourselves, but also allows us to challenge certain old unhealthy beliefs and open our minds to healthier thinking.

As people expand their view of themselves and explore additional information, there are spaces to make healthy changes in our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The narrative therapy So it does not have the objective of being able to change a person but rather for the patient to become an expert about his or her own life.

We all have a story. A series of events and experiences that make up our lives. Some stories are long, others short, some simple and others perhaps a little more complex, but what psychology has taught us is that expressing our ideas in the form of prose or verse is highly effective in understanding, clarifying and analyzing or even solve what is disordered in our mind. What’s your story?