Narrative therapy

Narrative therapy is a popular post-modern psychotherapy modality. Stories are powerful and diverse. With one objective reality, there can be many ways of describing it from different perspectives. Stories are how human beings have been experiencing themselves and the world. Narrative therapy recognizes that the story people tell defines who they are. By changing the story, you can change the person.

Narrative therapy externalizes the issues brought up in therapy. Traditional therapy tends to pathologize clients, seeing them as the problem that needs to be fixed. Narrative therapy sees clients’ issues as separate from their personhood.

In narrative therapy, the therapist takes a collaborative role rather than being the expert. Clients know the best about their life stories. Only they can open a new window to how they see the world. The therapist helps clients explore the inner resources they already have and have been using in the past. By telling stories of success, clients develop new, positive identities as being resilient and competent.

Due to its post-modern philosophy, narrative therapy believes that there’s no single truth or standard that people should use to judge their values and identities. It recognizes that mainstream culture and values can sometimes be oppressive. Society constructs different dominant ideologies under different contexts. Most of these ideologies are not absolute. Clients can accept the diversity in reality and form identities and values that match their subjective experiences rather than the dominant paradigms.

The therapist can invite clients to reflect on the meaning of their stories to help people make sense of the events that they experienced. The therapist can also ask clients to envision the future of the life story they want to write and then take actions in life to move towards that narrative.