Narrative Therapy

Relationship-basedPractice

Premise

People make sense of their world through language and stories

Can be brief

View people as competent

How Problems are Seen

• Problems arise because of subscriptions to narrow and self defeating views of world

• People are not problems; the problem is the problem

• Problems are to be deconstructed and externalized

New Insights Through Stories• Drawing people’s attention to subtle changes

in their lives can foster new insights, promote empowerment, and help people develop better ways to resolve difficulties

• People become authors of their own lives• Clients are experts on their lives. • Externalization allows re-authoring (hidden

problems can’t be changed)

Emphasis in Therapy

• Listening, accepting, making non-judgmental, non-confrontational comments

• Can ask multiple forms of same question (intricate and delicate process)

• Therapist as linguistic detective• Not seeking to heal or fix, but to learn about

client and understand them

Goals

• Therapists invite clients to describe their experience in new language; facilitate process of discovery

• Create shift to bring about new meaning to client’s story

Therapist Role

• Suggest alternative viewpoints• Mirroring • Emphasis on being encouraging of client

strengths and resources• Participatory, interactive• Careful listening, empathic, summarization,

paraphrasing to give people ownership

Therapist Role continued

• Search for exceptions to the problem• Ask clients to speculate about what kind of

future they could expect from new feelings of competence

• Separate person from problem

Techniques

• Questions!! More questions!!

• Creating alternative stories, identifying preferred directions

• Externalizing – when has client been successful, new (less problem-saturated) stories around problems

Techniques continue

• Raise Dilemmas

• Predict setbacks

• Celebrations, certificates

Limitations

• No set formulas• Attitude is critical• Therapist needs to be able to make quick

assessments, assist clients in setting up goals and effectively use appropriate interventions