Narrative therapy (or narrative practice) is a form of psychotherapy that seeks to help patients identify their values and the skills associated with them. It provides the patient with knowledge of their ability to embody these values so they can effectively confront current and future problems. The therapist seeks to help the patient co-author a new narrative about themselves by investigating the history of those values. Narrative therapy is a social justice approach to therapeutic conversations, seeking to challenge dominant discourses that shape people's lives in destructive ways. While narrative work is typically located within the field of family therapy, many authors and practitioners report using these ideas and practices in community work, schools and higher education. Narrative therapy has come to be associated with collaborative as well as person-centered therapy.
History Narrative therapy was developed during the 1970s and 1980s, largely by Australian social worker Michael White and David Epston of New Zealand, and it was influenced by different philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Jerome Bruner, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky etc.
Conversation maps
Re-authoring identity The narrative therapist focuses upon assisting people to create stories about themselves, about their identities, that are helpful to them. This work of "re-authoring identity" helps people identify their values and identify the skills and knowledge to live out these values by way of the therapist's skilled use of listening and questioning. Through the process of identifying the history of values in people's lives, the therapist and client are able to co-author a new story about the person. The story people tell about themselves and that is told about them is important in this approach, which asserts that the story of a person's identity may determine what they think is possible for themselves. The narrative process allows people to identify what values are important to them and how they might use their own skills and knowledge to live these values. Narrative therapy focuses on "unique outcomes" (a term of Erving Goffman), or moments that contradict a client's personal "problem-saturated" narrative. Unique outcomes work by revealing a person's strengths, agency, and emotional vitality that are hidden behind a person's personal problem-focused narratives. Unique outcomes can help to reveal entryways to more positive alternative narratives that clients are encouraged to adapt.
Externalizing conversations The concept of identity is important in narrative therapy. The approach aims not to conflate people's identities with the problems they may face or the mistakes they have made. Rather, the approach seeks to avoid modernist, essentialist notions of the self that lead people to believe there is a biologically determined "true self" or "true nature". Instead, identity, seen as primarily social, can be changed according to the choices people make. To separate people's identities from the problems they face, narrative therapy employs externalizing conversations. The process of externalization allows people to consider their relationships with problems. Narrative therapy allows people to become separated from their "internalized" understandings or ideas of a problem by looking at the problem from a social context, engaging in the construction and performance of preferred identities, and externalizing a person's strengths or positive attributes. An externalizing emphasis involves naming a problem so that a person can assess the problem's effects in their life, can analyze how the problem operates or works in their life, and in the end can choose their relationship to the problem.
"Statement of Position Map" In a narrative approach, the therapist aims to adopt a collaborative therapeutic posture rather than imposing ideas on people by giving them advice. Michael White developed a conversation map called a "Statement of Position Map" designed to elicit the client's own evaluation of the problems and developments in their lives. Both the therapist and the client are seen as having valuable information relevant to the process and the content of the therapeutic conversation. By adopting a posture of curiosity and collaboration, the therapist aims to give the implicit message to people that they already have knowledge and skills to solve the problems they face. When people develop solutions to their own problems on the basis of their own values, they may become much more committed to implementing these solutions.
Re-membering practice Narrative therapy identifies that identities are social achievements and the practice of re-membering draws closer those who support a person's preferred story about themselves and dis-engages those that do not support the person.
Absent but implicit The concept of "absent but implicit" refers to the discernment people must make between their expressed experiences and other experiences that they had in the past and already assigned meaning to. The concept of "absent but implicit" is used to discover stories of oneself that lie underneath the problem narrative being provided. Inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida, Michael White became curious about the values implicit in people's pain, their sense of failure, and actions. Often, people only feel pain or failure when their values are abridged, or when their relationships and lives are not as they should be. Furthermore, there are often stalled initiatives that people take in life that are also guided by implicit values.
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