What a Story: Narrative Therapy

By Lorenzo Ramos, Winter 2010 - Online Exlusive

There’s little room to argue about the fact that psychotherapy has plenty to do with people talking about themselves ... and then there’s the clients, right? Oh boy. The process of a client’s “opening up” is a paramount moment for all budding psychologists, as many of us here at CSPP may know. It’s the moment when your hours of empathic listening and boundary-setting pay off, and you finally get to hear the client’s story.

This very story, which Michael White coins as the ‘personal narrative’, is the basis of narrative therapy, a modality where the client’s assimilation of past and present becomes itself the focus of the psychological work.

The key? The personal narrative is heavily associated with one’s sense of self. In fact, this connection between story and self is the framework for the transformative changes that have come from successful interventions involving narrative therapy.

Whether you’re in the psychodynamic, CBT or family systems camp, the personal narrative can serve as a powerful access point into the client’s situation and this is invaluable.

Think: by objectifying and externalizing the substance of a story, a person creates a subtle distance between themselves and their circumstances, and this is a distance that would make even Marsha Linehan proud. White’s process of “externalization” turns past events from intervention-fodder into the active intervention itself, allowing the narrative to be edited and retold from a mindful perspective.

That goodbye that was never said, poor choices made in the past, the horrors of trauma ... any event that has influenced the core-beliefs of a person can be retold in a constructive, more holistic way, according to the narrative model. Such an intervention can give the client the resolution that is so often the grounds for a transformative breakthrough in therapy.

But before you go touting the dangers of fantasy, let us take a trip to the mountains.

An avid meditator who sat for years in Tibet became enlightened by contemplating herself as the “essence-nature.” This classic paradigm of meditation, “That which you contemplate, you become,” is a way of relaying this same basic truth of narrative therapy: that the self is just as much a product of our thoughts and beliefs as it is a product of external experience.

Tell me, have you ever had a visceral reaction to a hallucinatory projection of your inner conflicts, Dr. Freud? Do you dream? Accessing the same levels of the mind, the creative editing of narrative therapy is one of the most groundbreaking tools the modality has to offer.

As you can see, the personal narrative serves as a way to explore inner-conflicts that have led to debilitating points in the construction of the self. It allows us to access them therapeutically using storytelling, humanity’s oldest form of conceptualization. And as a whole, narrative therapy recognizes and nourishes that primal instinct of the human being, to know oneself. So think about your story, it could very well be a best-seller in waiting.