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 is the main therapeutic training I undertook during my master’s degree, but my practice is also informed by psychodynamic thinking, which complements narrative practice with ideas about attachment, how early our life experiences shows up in the present, and how trauma impacts us.
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 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 that 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, workplace 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?
Narrative Therapy, traumatic experiences and 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 silence or brush aside the personal values that are important to us. And often those things brushed aside by others, including traumatic experiences and inequality, are what in a work situation might lead to vicarious trauma.
Painful experiences of injustice need to be named and listened to
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 workplace incident, there could be the organisation’s subtle blame or attempts to wash its hands of responsibility, 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 childhood trauma.
We avoid re-traumatising and work in a trauma-sensitive way by not perpetuating any forcefulness or judgment that might be part of the shame that can follow traumatic experiences. Trauma can be spoken about without sharing details (although sometimes people feel the need to do this and we should be able to sit with that without crumbling).
These are examples of questions I might ask:
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?
