Narrative Therapy: Story-Based Psychotherapy

Surely you have realized that, depending on the way in which a story is explained to us, we value in a way or another to the characters who intervene in it and we judge in a different way the nature of the problem posed in these narrations.

Fictional works such as Rant: the life of a murderer or the movie Mementoexplore the possibilities through which the narrative form can affect the content of what is being told, the way to portray the moral background of the characters or even the type of antagonisms that exist in these stories.

However, it is easy to tell facts in various ways when the author can hide information about key moments from us. What happens, however, when the narrator is us? Are we capable of generating and at the same time experiencing the different ways in which we can narrate our lives?

There is a type of psychotherapy which not only responds affirmatively to this last question, but also transfers this potentiality to the core of its therapeutic proposal. Is named Narrative Therapy.

What is Narrative Therapy?

Narrative Therapy It is a type of therapy in which the client (usually called "co-author" or "co-author"), and not the therapist, is assumed to be the person who is the expert in their life history.

It is also known for being a form of therapy in which the use of letters, invitations and written personal stories is proposed, both in terms of relative to the client's life as in those things that refer to the course of therapy, not as a way of providing information to the therapist, but as part of the treatment of the client's problems.

Michael White and David Epston, the pioneers of this kind of psychotherapy

This form of therapy was originally developed by therapists Michael White Y David epston, who made their proposals internationally known by publishing the book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, although it was not his first work on the subject. Together, laid theoretical foundations that decades later would continue to be developed by other people.

Today there are several proposals for approaching therapy that can be framed within the limits of Narrative Therapy. However, if we want to understand what Narrative Therapy is, we can hardly do it from a description of its techniques. We must also talk about the worldview from which it starts, its philosophical bases.

Narrative Therapy as a fruit of postmodernity

The postmodern philosophy It has crystallized in different ways of thinking, many of which influence the way in which people in Western countries think about reality today. All these styles of thought inherited from postmodernity have in common, on the one hand, the assumption that there is different ways of explaining the same thing, and on the other, the of the no single valid explanation. It is assumed that our bodies are not made to perceive and internalize reality as it occurs in the nature, and that to interact with the environment we must build by ourselves stories about the functioning of the world.

This is what the thinker Alfred Korzybsky called the relationship between the map and the territory. It is impossible for each of us to imagine planet Earth in all its details, and that is why we have to relate to this terrain by creating mental abstractions that can be assumed by our mind: maps. Of course, there are many possible maps that can represent the same area, and although their use may be practical, that does not mean that we know the territory itself.

Narrative Therapy starts from these philosophical assumptions and places the client or co-author of the therapies at the center of the focus of the sessions. It is not a subject that is limited to providing information for the therapist to generate a diagnosis and a treatment program, but rather both work by weaving a useful and adaptive way of presenting the client's life story.

Understanding Narrative Therapy

Human beings, as narrative-creating agents, we live life through various stories that contradict each other at many points of friction. At a given moment, one may be more important, and for other aspects another may be predominant.

The important thing is that, from the philosophical background of Narrative Therapy, there is no narrative that has the power to suppress totally the rest, although there are stories to which we pay more attention than others in certain contexts and given certain terms. That is why We will always be able to generate alternative stories to explain, both to others and to ourselves, what happens to us.

Due to the above, Narrative Therapy proposes a therapeutic approach in which the client's experiences are questioned and reformulated through the narration of events, so that they are posed in a way in which the problem does not go on to define the person and limit their ways of perceiving reality.

In this type of therapy we are not looking for a way to access "reality" (something inaccessible if we assume the postmodern postulates), but rather the possibility of opening the story in which the person narrates her experiences to generate alternative stories in which the problem does not "soak" it everything. If there is a problem that disturbs the way the client experiences her life, Narrative Therapy proposes create the possibility that the dominant narrative in which the present conception of the problem is installed loses prominence in favor of other alternative narratives.

Outsourcing the problem

In Narrative Therapy, ways of relating the problem are promoted as if it were something that, in itself, does not define the identity of the person. This is done so that the problem does not become the "filter" through which all those things pass that we perceive (something that would only feed the discomfort and make it perpetuate over time). In this way, By externalizing the problem, it is introduced into the narrative of the person's life as if it were one more element, something separate from the person himself..

This goal can be achieved by using a externalizing language. By linguistically separating the problem and the person's conception of himself, the latter has the power to express stories in which the experience of the problem is experienced in a way different.

Narrative thinking

Narratives are the placement of a series of narrated events in a time frame of make sense and take us from the introduction of a story to the resolution of the herself.

Every narrative has some elements that define it as such: a specific location, a period of time during which events take place, actors, a problem, objectives and actions that make the story advance. According to some psychologists such as Jerome Bruner, the narrative is one of the most present discursive forms in our way of approaching reality.

Narrative Therapy is born, among other things, from the distinction between logical-scientific thinking and the narrative thinking. While the first serves to provide truthfulness to things based on a series of arguments, narrative thinking brings realism to events by placing them in a time frame and creating a story with them. That is to say: while logical-scientific thinking investigates abstract laws about the functioning of the environment, narratives deal with the particularities of concrete experience, changing points of view and the subjection of facts to a space and time determined.

Narrative Therapy is ascribed to narrative thinking so that both the therapist and the client can treat from you to you the related experiences and negotiate between them the elaboration of these specific stories and credible.

The role of the therapist in Narrative Therapy

The client is the maximum expert in his experiences, and this role is reflected in the approach used during Narrative Therapy. It is understood that only the person who attends the consultation can implement an alternative narrative to the one they are already living, since it is the one who has direct access to their experiences plus.

The therapist who implements Narrative Therapy, for his part, is guided by two main precepts:

1. Staying in a state of curiosity.

2. Asking questions to which the answer is truly unknown.

Thus, the role of the co-author is to generate his life story, while the therapist acts as a facilitator by asking the right questions and bringing up issues determined. In this way, the problem is dissolved in an alternative narrative.

Other guidelines that therapists who work with Narrative Therapy follow are:

• Facilitate the establishment of a therapeutic relationship in which your own point of view is not imposed on the client.

• Actively work to recognize narrative style that the client makes his story unfold.

• Ensure that his contributions are designed to be collected and reformulated by the client, not just to be accepted by it.

• Accept customer complaints about sessions and not take them as a sign of ignorance or misunderstanding.

• Recognize those alternative narratives in which the problem is losing weight.

Not blaming the client

In Narrative Therapy the possibility of narrating an experience in many different ways is assumed (necessarily generating several experiences where before only one seemed to exist), granting the client the maximum power to generate his narration about what happens to him and not blaming him for the difficulties that arise.

From this approach closed or exclusive discourses about what is happening are rejected, and the need to create narratives open to change is underlined, flexibility that will allow the person to introduce changes, give importance to some facts and take it away from others. It is understood that where there is a feeling of guilt originating in therapy, there is a perception of not knowing how to adapt to a narrative thread that comes from the outside, which means that the client has not been involved in their generation.

summarizing

In short, Narrative Therapy is a framework of relationships between therapist and client (co-author) in which the second has the power to generate alternative narratives of what happens to him, so as not to be limited by his perception of problems. The theory related to this therapeutic approach is prolific in methods and strategies to facilitate the appearance of these alternative narratives and, of course, their explanation far exceeds the claims made in this Article.

If you think this topic is interesting, I invite you to investigate on your own and start, for example, by reading some of the works that appear in the bibliography section.

Bibliographic references:

• Bruner, L. (1987). Life as Narrative. Social Research, 54 (1), pp. 11 - 32.
• White and Epston (1993). Narrative means for therapeutic purposes. Barcelona: Paidós.
• White, M. (2002). The narrative approach in the experience of therapists. Barcelona: Gedisa.