Theory to Therapy: Narrative Therapy

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Ever wondered how the stories you tell yourself about your past shape your future? What if you could rewrite them for a better tomorrow? Join us as we journey into the transformative world of narrative therapy. Discover, through the powerful case study of Jimmy, a middle schooler with a habit of stealing, the impact of our narratives on our actions. Unearth how narrative therapy encourages us to fill in missing details, re-authoring our lives for a more positive future. Let's explore how thin, absolute plots can bind us to negative patterns and how changing the plot can set us free.

Get ready to dive deeper! Uncover the unique narrative therapy approach that separates problems and re-constructs a more positive narrative. We discuss the principles and terms key to this therapy, such as the importance of a thick or rich narrative and the therapist's not-knowing stance. Find out how therapists look for unique outcomes within the client's story, breaking free from problem-saturated narratives. This episode is your comprehensive guide to understanding narrative therapy and stepping into the potential for rewriting your life's story. Get ready to rethink and reshape your narrative!

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This podcast is not associated with the NBCC, AMFTRB, ASW, ANCC, NASP, NAADAC, CCMC, NCPG, CRCC, or any state or governmental agency responsible for licensure.

Transcript

Eric: 0:06

Welcome back to another episode of Theory to Therapy. I'm Eric and I've got a great topic for today. Today we're diving deep into the world of narrative therapy. We're going to start off with a short case study using a middle schooler. Say that you found out that your son, jimmy, had a problem with stealing things and he'd been doing it for a little while. He's gotten brought in from school, taken stuff out the teacher's desk, brought in from a couple department stores never anything big, but it's still beginning to worry you and so you take him to a therapist. What do you tell the therapist? Here's little Jimmy. He's been having a problem stealing things and I think it's because he's attention seeking. You see, we have kind of a dysfunctional family and it feels like he gets lost and, doc, I want you to work on him, to fix him for us, because it's obviously feeling like he needs attention from our dysfunctional family.

Eric: 1:03

In narrative therapy, what you have done is you've just created a story around Jimmy stealing. Jimmy doesn't just steal, he's stealing because of something. And in constructing this story, what you've given if you've repeated it to Jimmy, if this has become part of his makeup in an internal sense is that now he's telling himself this story. And why is he stealing? He knows why he's stealing because he has a dysfunctional family. You've given him a story to build his life around and the story begins to drive the action. Now what if you could change the details of the story, change the outline of the story, add things don't make them up, but find the ones that you have left out because they didn't really fit the dominant plot of the story.

Eric: 2:07

In narrative therapy, what Michael White and David Epstein, two of the leaders in this field, have come up with is that they have found that, in helping somebody to recast the details of their story, they can actually help them envision a different future for themselves and, in so doing, change the way they look at life. And really, that's the point of therapy in the first place. And so they found out that personal experience is ambiguous. We remember things that we choose to remember. We add details, we forget details, and because personal experience, by its very nature, because we don't have a recorder going with us, our life doesn't have somebody following us with a video recorder we remember what we remember and because of that, because of the ambiguity of it, we give our own experiences meaning by placing them in the larger context of the story that we've created for ourselves. And the more positive the story, the better a role we have for ourselves, the more willing we are to act toward that good narrative, as opposed to acting down to one in which we're dysfunctional.

Eric: 3:24

Now, what's a story? A story is a series of events that are linked in sequence across time according to a plot. That's what a story is. Now, any literature teacher can tell you that. But in terms of psychotherapy, you recognize that the person has created the plot to go around. The story that they tell about themselves, change the plot, change the end of the story.

Eric: 3:52

The plot we use to put our stories in context, to determine how we see ourselves, is called our dominant story. Are we the heroes or are we the villains? Do we have a good role or do we have a bad role? The dominant story is going to inform how we play out our narrative in the future. If a person has a problem, it's often because the story they tell themselves about their lives leads them to see the problem reoccurring. The story begins to dominate our future because we've told ourselves this story that has ourselves as the villain, that has ourselves as a problem. If you had gone to a therapist about, say, jimmy's problem and that you described it as being attention seeking, and that's all he got, you've limited the future within the context of that story, a narrative therapist would recognize that that is what they would call a thin plot, that is, it doesn't have any of the richness or ambiguity that our lives actually have. So, in helping to recast the story, the thin plot, that is the plot that leads to only one conclusion. Now, a thin plot can lead to a negative or a positive conclusion. The thinness of the plot discerns whether or not it really has the richness, the fullness that real life has. But let's be honest, you only go to a therapist if you're having a problem, and the thinness of the plot usually recurs in the fact that it's being told in a way that accentuates the problem, so that the negative conclusion that happens in the story is often informed by the stories we tell ourselves. But those don't happen in a vacuum. They happen within a larger cultural context, informed by those cultural factors Eurocentrism can be one that has often been denoted, or other factors like that Also informed by factors that tend to see things in terms of absolutes good versus bad, healthy versus unhealthy, normal versus abnormal, narratives that tend to sift the story into one pole or the other. In that case, if it gets sifted into an unhealthy one and we tend to recur that then we find ourselves trapped in that thin, absolute narrative.

Eric: 6:17

Narrative therapy seeks to help the person re-author and that's a term you'll find in context of narrative therapy to re-author their story by adding those details, those descriptions that the original narratives sought to leave out, so that Jimmy's not just stealing for attention seeking maybe he just wanted to pack a gum that day. The fact that we saw it as attention seeking, the fact that we added the layer of meaning on top of it and then described it only as bad, as opposed to just wanted some gum, made it have a life of its own, so that the next time Jimmy stole it wasn't just based on wanting gum, which he may have had the money for that day, which he lacked before, but now he recognizes that he's lived in a dysfunctional family and he wants more attention, doesn't he? And that's how we become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In narrative therapy. What you begin to seek is an alternative story. You add the details that were missing my friends had gone, I didn't have any money that day. You left that out of the original story because it no longer fit the plot line that was given to you. But when you see the richness what a narrative therapist would call the thickness of the story, you begin to come to life. You begin to be able to see the actual events within their broader context and in so doing create the alternative plot that no longer has Jimmy being a bad boy but acting within a larger context friends wanting gum and him wanting some too and in so doing freeing the narrative to no longer buying Jimmy to be somebody who has to steal and gain notoriety within his family. It frees him from the attention-seeking behavior and he's able to re-author his story into a richer, fuller or thicker narrative, one that no longer has him being just the bad guy. In this you'll see that in narrative therapy. The hallmark, then, is that the therapist is no longer judging the person by good or bad actions, but helping them to retell their story, often using other family members, eliciting their help in finding those details that the person has left out and in eliciting the help from the other members of the family or the wider community in helping to recast the story One of the hallmarks of narrative therapy, then, is that you'll hear them say is that the person is not the problem.

Eric: 8:53

The problem is the problem, and by taking the problem and setting it out as its own character within the story, you can now deal with the problem as an object in and of itself. As a matter of fact, oftentimes you'll hear them referring to depression, say, as an actual actor within the narrative that the person tells about themselves, so that the therapist might ask what does depression want you to act like today? So that once you've objectified the problem, once you have it as a separate part of your narrative, you can deal with it creatively in a different sense than you had before, and so come to a different conclusion, a different plot line as you re-author your story. To recap, some of the terms that you'll need to remember is that white and epston are two of the exemplars of this form of therapy. They're from Australia and New Zealand, but don't hold that against them. They seek to help the person.

Eric: 9:53

The therapist will work with the person to co-author the story, and part of what they're looking for is to help the person actually re-author, retell their story in the terms that will have a positive outcome for them, the emphasis is on story, is on narrative, so that when they deal with the actual story itself, they tend to put it down as a text and when you're done, they'll give you a certificate of completion as a text to help you retell the story.

Eric: 10:22

Remember that they're going to look for a thick or rich narrative, one that has multiple layers of meaning to it and possibilities within it, as opposed to a thin narrative that only has one outcome.

Eric: 10:35

They're looking for an alternative narrative, one that retells the story in a different way. They tend to look and one of the sayings that you'll hear is that the person is not the problem, but problem is the problem, and they tend to try to externalize the problem and have it as separate within the context of the narrative. Remember that a narrative is a random chain of events as informed by a larger plot that we impose upon it. The therapist will often take a not-knowing stance, that they'll look to try and solve problem-saturated stories, ones that have to deal with problems, coming at the person that they find no cure for and helping them to re-author the story so that the problems get solved, and that they look for the unique outcomes, that is, times within your story, where you were able to tell the story and the problem was no longer a factor, and that's what you're trying to replicate within the therapy. That's narrative therapy and that's what you need to know.