Narrative Therapy: The Form Of Psychotherapy Based On Stories About The Patient’s Life
Surely you have realized that, depending on the way in which a story is explained to us, we value the characters who participate in it in one way or another and we judge the nature of the problem posed in these narratives in a different way.
Works of fiction such as Rant: the life of a murderer or the movie mementoexplore the possibilities through which narrative form can affect the content of what is being told the way of portraying the moral background of the characters or even the type of antagonisms that exist in these stories.
However, it is easy to tell facts in various ways when the author can hide information about key moments from us. What happens, however, when the narrator is us? Are we able to generate and at the same time experience the different ways in which we can narrate our lives?
There is a type of psychotherapy that not only responds affirmatively to this last question, but also transfers this potential to the core of its therapeutic proposal. Is called Narrative Therapy.
Narrative Therapy is a type of therapy in which the client (commonly called “co-author”), and not the therapist, is assumed to be the expert on their life story.
It is also known for being a form of therapy in which the use of letters, invitations and written personal stories is proposed, both in relation to the client’s life and in those things that refer to the course of the therapy, not just as way to provide information to the therapist, but as part of the treatment of the client’s problems.
Michael White and David Epston, the pioneers of this type of psychotherapy
This form of therapy was originally developed by therapists Michael White and David Epston who made their proposals known internationally through the publication of the book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Endsalthough it was not his first work on the subject. Together, They laid theoretical foundations that decades later other people would continue to develop.
Today there are several proposals for approaching therapy that can be framed within the limits of Narrative Therapy. However, if we want to understand what Narrative Therapy is, we will hardly be able to do so from a description of its techniques. We must also talk about the worldview from which it starts, its philosophical bases.
Narrative Therapy as a fruit of postmodernity
The postmodern philosophy It has crystallized in different ways of thinking, many of which influence the way in which the inhabitants of Western countries think about reality today. All these styles of thought inherited from postmodernism have in common, on the one hand, the assumption that there is different ways of explaining the same thing, and on the other that of the no existence of a single valid explanation. It is assumed that our bodies are not made to perceive and internalize reality as it occurs in nature, and that to interact with the environment we must construct stories for ourselves about how the world works.
This is what the thinker Alfred Korzybsky called the relationship between the map and the territory. It is impossible for each of us to imagine planet Earth in all its details, and that is why we have to relate to this terrain by creating mental abstractions that can be assimilated by our mind: maps. Of course, there are many possible maps that can represent the same area, and although their use may be practical for us, that does not mean that we know the territory itself.
Narrative Therapy is based on these philosophical assumptions and places the client or co-author of the therapies at the center of the focus of the sessions. It is not a subject that is limited to providing information for the therapist to generate a diagnosis and a treatment program, but rather both work by weaving a useful and adaptive way of presenting the client’s life story.
Understanding Narrative Therapy
Human beings, as narrative-creating agents, We live life through various stories that contradict each other at many points of friction. At a given moment one may be more important, and for other aspects another may be predominant.
The important thing is that, from the philosophical background of Narrative Therapy, there is no narrative that has the power to completely suppress the others, although there are stories to which we pay more attention than others in certain contexts and given certain conditions. That’s why We will always be able to generate alternative stories to explain, both to others and to ourselves, what happens to us.
For what was said above, Narrative Therapy proposes a therapeutic approach in which the client’s experiences are questioned and reformulated through the narration of events so that they are presented in a way in which the problem does not define the person and limit their ways of perceiving reality.
This type of therapy is not looking for a way to access “reality” (something inaccessible if we assume the postulates of postmodernity), but rather the possibility of opening the story in which the person narrates their experiences to generate alternative stories in those in which the problem does not “soak” everything. If there is a problem that disturbs the way in which the client experiences his or her life, Narrative Therapy proposes create the possibility that the dominant narrative in which the present conception of the problem is installed loses prominence in favor of other alternative narratives.
Externalization of the problem
In Narrative Therapy, ways of relating the problem are promoted as if it were something that, in itself, does not define the identity of the person. This is done so that the problem does not become the “filter” through which all those things that we perceive pass (something that would only feed the discomfort and cause it to be perpetuated over time). Thus, By externalizing the problem, it is introduced into the narrative of the person’s life as if it were another element, something separate from the person themselves.
This goal can be achieved by using a externalizing language. By linguistically separating the problem and the person’s conception of themselves, the latter has the power to express stories in which the experience of the problem is experienced differently.
narrative thinking
Narratives are the placement of a series of narrated events in a time frame so that they make sense and take us from the introduction of a story to its resolution.
Every narrative has some elements that define it as such: a specific location, a time period during which the events take place, some actors, a problem, some objectives and some actions that make the story progress. According to some psychologists such as Jerome Bruner, narration is one of the discursive forms most present in our way of approaching reality.
Narrative Therapy is born, among other things, from the distinction between logical-scientific thinking and the narrative thinking. While the first serves to provide truth to things based on a series of arguments, Narrative thinking brings realism to events, by placing them in a time frame and creating a story with them. That is to say: while logical-scientific thinking investigates abstract laws about the functioning of the environment, narratives deal with the particularities of concrete experience, changing points of view and the subjection of facts to a specific space and time.
Narrative Therapy is ascribed to narrative thinking so that both the therapist and the client can deal with the reported experiences face to face and negotiate between them the elaboration of these specific and plausible stories.
The client is the ultimate expert in their experiences, and this role is reflected in the approach used during Narrative Therapy. It is understood that only The person who attends the consultation can implement an alternative narrative to the one they are already living, since they are the ones who have direct access to their experiences. and furthermore.
The therapist who implements Narrative Therapy, for his part, is guided by two main precepts :
1. Stay in a state of curiosity.
2. Asking questions that you really don’t know the answer to.
Thus, the role of the co-author is to generate the story of your life, while the therapist acts as a facilitating agent by asking the right questions and bringing up specific topics. In this way, the problem is dissolved into an alternative narrative.
Other guidelines that therapists who work with Narrative Therapy follow are:
Non-blaming of the client
In Narrative Therapy the possibility of narrating an experience in many different ways is assumed (necessarily generating several experiences where before only one seemed to exist), giving the client maximum power to generate their narrative about what happens to them and not blaming them for the difficulties that arise.
From this approach Closed or exclusive discourses about what happens are rejected, and the need to create narratives open to change is highlighted. flexibility that will allow the person to introduce changes, give importance to some facts and take it away from others. It is understood that where there is a feeling of guilt originating in therapy, there is a perception of not knowing how to adapt to a narrative thread that is given from outside, which means that the client has not been involved in its generation.
Summing up
In short, Narrative Therapy is a framework of relationships between therapist and client (co-author) in which the second has the power to generate alternative narratives of what happens to him, so as not to be limited by his perception of the problems. The theory related to this therapeutic approach is prolific in methods and strategies to facilitate the emergence of these alternative narratives and, of course, its explanation far exceeds the claims set forth in this article.
I invite you, if you think this topic is interesting, to investigate on your own and start, for example, by reading some of the works that appear in the bibliography section.
