What is Narrative Therapy?
Narrative therapy is a journey with many different paths to explore. . . In the ways we work, we aim to link histories and lives as we believe we become who we are through relationships and we change through relationships.
This journal entry is not covering all of the aspects of what narrative therapy is. But I hope it gives you a taste and also explains how I use narrative therapy.
Narrative therapy seeks to be a respectful, non-blaming approach to counselling and community work, which centres people as the experts in their own lives (Dulwich Centre, n.d)
How we use a therapeutic technique or a frame in therapy is influenced by our personality and ethical striving, not just the training we have done. Albeit, you should experience something different, if you try narrative therapy as opposed to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
The main therapeutic stance of a narrative therapist is curiosity
The notion of curiosity is what made me fall in love with narrative therapy. Specifically, it was the invitations to reflect on new possibilities, rather than being told to challenge the maladaptive thoughts in the person I worked with.
What curiosity means in therapy is, I try not to think, I have all the answers making assumptions about you — or for that matter the people you might bring into our conversation.
An example of when this becomes important is when someone has an ambivalent relationship to another person, a workplace a culture or community.
You might both hate and love, detest and feel attached at the same time to whoever you are talking about.
Ambivalence is welcome and so are other ‘imperfect’ feelings
If I jump in hard with my judgment of how this person, work place or community might treat you badly, I would be a therapy thief — potentially robbing you of your emotional experience in talking it out and figuring out how it affects you.
It is a respectful way of working that provides you the space to develop your agency, which is why, as a narrative therapist, I might stop myself in my tracks and say things like:
I think I just assumed how you might have been feeling about this, could you tell me if I got it right?
Is there some other way you might describe this problem that is different to what I suggested?
. . . As such, our expertise is not in how we deliver ‘interventions’, but in how we provide a context, through a scaffolding of questions, that makes it possible for people to become more aware of their own skills and knowledges (Dulwich Centre, n.d.)
Narrative Therapy, traumatic Experiences & Injustice:
As a narrative therapist, I help people make meaning of the injustices done to them and invite them to look at what has been violated. There are often norms in cultures, workplaces and communities that silences, or brush aside the personal values that are important to us.
As narrative therapists, we invite reflection and let the painful experience of multiple injustices be named and heard.
If I meet with someone who has experienced a violent attack at work (or elsewhere), there are often multiple story-lines to explore.
As an example, if it is a work place incident, there could be the organisation’s subtle blame or washing hands not recognising the lack of resources that led to a person being beaten up. There might also be links to another story of being let down in an earlier experience of trauma.
We avoid re-traumatising by not perpetuating any forcefulness or judgment that might be part of the the shame that can follow traumatic experiences. Trauma can be spoken about without sharing details (although sometimes people need to do this and we should be able to sit with that without crumbling):
What was precious to you, that you feel you might have lost now?
What would you like to share with me that might make me understand how this has affected you?
Are there stories of judgment in your workplace/family/culture that you are not okay with?
Is narrative therapy evidence based?
As someone who has done Advanced Statistics and Research Methods in my psychology undergraduate degree, I know research, and I subscribe to using evidence based therapy.
The therapeutic relationship is central to the ethos of narrative therapy
What is omitted when discussing what evidence based therapy, is that if you want something different than temporary symptom relief and lasting psychological change, it is the ‘therapist component’ that counts. In particular the working relationship between you and the therapist. The technique or modality such as CBT or EMDR matters less.
Therefore, if you are looking for quality therapy, ask about how your therapist understands the working alliance or therapeutic relationship.
Psychologist and researcher Jonathan Shedler (2011) explains this in this video in an (for the topic) accessible way. You can also read his journal article The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy which drew on multiple meta-analyses to document the point.
Importantly, Shedler found ‘nonpsychodynamic therapies may be effective in part because the more skilled practitioners utilize techniques that have long been central to psychodynamic theory and practice (Shedler, 2011).
References
Dulwich Centre. (n.d.). What is narrative therapy. https://dulwichcentre.com.au/what-is-narrative-therapy. https://dulwichcentre.com.au/what-is-narrative-therapy
Shedler, J. (2011). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Research, 9-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60761-792-1_2
