Narrative Therapy
In the early 80’s a new theory garnered acclaim in psychotherapeutic circles. It is called Narrative therapy and has its roots in a postmodern idea known as constructivism. Ian Ridgway (2005) defines constructivism this way, “Humans create meaning within social contexts because it is believed either that reality is essentially without meaning or its true meaning is beyond us.” Michael White and David Epston are the two most prominent figures in the development of Narrative Therapy. White and Epston recognized a shift in how people construct meaning for their lives and believed that to help a client it was important to deconstruct the stories in his or her life the client would naturally alter the behavior (Nichols, 2010).
Michael White was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1948 (Wikipedia, 2010). He began his career working as a mechanical draftsman but quickly discovered that he would rather work with people than machines (Nichols, 2010). He returned to school to obtain a degree in social work and graduated from the University of South Australia in 1979. By 1983, White founded the Dulwich Center where he developed and implemented his narrative therapy approach (Wikipedia, 2010).
White believed in the importance of listening to each person’s story. He was affected by his early work as a social worker in an Australian children’s hospital. It was there that he became disenchanted with conventional models of psychotherapy. This led him to study some of Michael Foucault’s constructivist concepts about how people are marginalized by the meta-narratives of society. Foucault theorized that the “experts” in society created narratives that oppressed people who did not live up to standards of a given society. Ev...
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Nichols, M. P. (2010) Family Therapy Concepts and Methods Ninth Edition. Boston, MA: Allyn &Bacon.
Ridgeway, I. (2005) Narrative Therapy. Retrieved from http://www.myauz.com/ianr/articles/lect11narrativetherapy.pdf
Ross, V. & Shapiro, J. (2002) Applications of Narrative Theory and Therapy to the Practice of Family Medicine. Family Medicine, 34 (2), 96-100 Retrieved from www.stfm.org/fmhub/fm2002/feb02/sa.pdf
Scharf, R. S. (2004). Theories of Psychotherapy and Counseling Concepts and Cases Third Edition. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks Cole-Thomsen Learning.
Scherr, L. (2006). Narrative Therapy. [PowerPoint Slides]. Retreived from www.psych.umn.edu/courses/spring06/sherrl/psy3511/lectures/narrative.pdf
White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company Inc.
Experiential Family Therapy is a therapy that encourages patients to address subconscious issues through actions, and role playing. It is a treatment that is used for a group of people in order to determine the source of problem in the family (Gurman and Kniskern, 2014). Experiential Family Therapy has its strengths and weaknesses. One of the strengths of this therapy is that, it focuses on the present and patients are able to express their emotions on what is happening to them presently. The client will have time to share everything about his/her life experiences one on one without any fears. As a result, it helps the client in the healing process because, he/she is able to express their feelings freely and come out of the problem. Therefore, in this type of therapy, the clients are deeply involved in solving their issues. It helps clients to scrutinize their individual connections and to initiate a self-discovery through therapy, on how their relationships influence their current behaviors (Gurman and Kniskern, 2014). By examining their personal relationships through experiential family therapy, family members are able to
Because of the large case load and lack of time I see the constructivist theory providing a personalized counseling session that will resolve some of the present tense that the student is experiencing with academic and/or career related stresses. SFT was fascinating to learn and felt that I could use SFT in becoming a successful academic counselor at a community college as in higher education. Students know best which solution best fits their problem but need guidance in discovering what options and/or techniques that will lead them to an ideal solution. A narrative approach’s of getting the student to externalize their problems in a narrative format was a great way of getting clients to overcome pending present problems. These therapeutic approaches encourage me to counsel students to find solutions that will help assist a diverse population in resolving their problems in one or more counseling
For this reason, some of the brief therapies, such as strategic family therapy or solution-focused therapy, that focus on rapid change without much attention to understanding, might be more appropriate. However, I believe these brief therapies do not give clients enough time to really parse out their problem. I am wary of counseling that limits clients’ ability to tell their stories fully, which seems like just one more way of silencing people, oppressing them, and keeping them in line. In working with my clients I want to collectively understand how problem-saturated stories developed, the cultural, familial, or biological factors that might be involved, and the availability of choices. I believe that narrative therapy is the most flexible approach in this respect because although not brief, it is efficient and seems to be effective long-term, although more research is needed, which is challenging because of the subjective nature of this approach (Madigan, 2011). In my therapy practice, I want to leave clients feeling hopeful and liberated by helping them to see the problem as separate from their identities and as only one story to choose from several, and by acknowledging the contextual factors contributing to the
Storytelling’s impact on people who use it has been life saving in certain cases. By asserting the existence of different perspectives, writers get to suppress their own opinions in order to sympathize with others. (insert thing about meta-fiction) With this idea in mind, author Kate Taylor wrote the novel Serial Monogamy, a meta-fiction of a writer recalling the story of her husband’s affair and her deal with terminal breast cancer, all through her telling of Dickens’ secret life and tales of the Arabian Nights. In Serial Monogamy, storytelling makes people more understanding as they explore new perspectives.
Narrative reasoning focuses on the client’s particular circumstances and takes into account the client’s past, present, and future and how their current circumstances will affect their life. This gives the practitioner ideas on how to collaborate with the client and family based on the individual’s journey. It is important for the occupational therapy practitioner to help the client see how the treatment
McAdams, D.P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of general psychology, 5 (2), 100.
In the summer between third and fourth grade my mother and father sat my sister and I down and informed us that my mom had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. My mom’s experience of MS emulates narrative concepts detailed in Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller. In his work, Frank describes different kinds of illness narratives ranging from the morbid chaos narrative to the more inspiring restitution narrative. In accordance with Frank’s definitions, my mother has responded to the situation by using her body didactically and communicatively by proactively reaching out to an active community of MS sufferers, including recently diagnosed friends and family. She has used her body with discipline as well, through her commitment to a prescription of nightly injections. However, the dynamic nature of my mother’s experience with MS complicates Frank’s classification of body types because she embodies multiple body types at various stages of her disease. Her illness narrative most closely matches that of the quest narrative, drawing elements from both the automythology and memoir facets.
Corey, G. (2013). Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy (9th Edition). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing.
Gehart, D. (2014). Mastering competencies in family therapy: A practical guide to theories and clinical case documentation. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
In Alex Kyrou's 2015 short film, White Awake, therapy becomes one man's solace as his therapist helps him to find closure with his own life story.
Using narratives to gain an insight into human experience is becoming an increasingly popular method of exploration. Assuming that people are in essence narrative beings that experience every emotion and state through narrative, the value of exploring these gives us a unique understanding. Narrative is thought to act as instrument to explore how an individual constructs their own identity (Czarniawska, 1997) and explain how each individual makes sense of the world around them (Gabriel, 1998). It may also give us an understanding into individual thought processes in relation to individual decision making practices (O’Connor, 1997). It is evident from studies such as Heider and Simmel (1944), that there appears to be an instinctive nature in people to introduce plots structures and narratives into all situations, with an intention to construct meaning to all aspects of life in its entirety. The value of narrative is that it is a tool that allows us to understand what it means to be human and gives us an insight into a person’s lived experience whilst still acknowledging their cultural and social contexts. Narrative is thought to be significance as it is ‘a fruitful organizing principle to help understand the complex conduct of human beings (p.49)’ (Sarbin, 1990) The construction of a person’s narrative is thought to be dependent on each person’s individual awareness of themselves and the circumstances that surround them. However, a debate to whether a person is able to formulate a valid narrative in the face of a mental illness such as schizophrenia has emerged. Sufferer’s symptoms are often thought to interfere with their abilities to perceive within a level deemed acceptable to their society’s norms and therefore the validity ...
In the simplest form, there is a basic structural pattern to narratives, as expressed through Tzvetan Todorov’s explanation of narrative movement between two equilibriums. A narrative begins in a stable position until something causes disequilibrium, however, by the end of the story, the equilibrium is re-established, though it is different than the beginning (O’Shaughnessy 1999: 268). Joseph Cam...
Corey, G. (2011). Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy. (ninth ed., pp. 291-301). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Nichols, M. P. (2011). The essentials of family therapy. Boston, Ma.: Allyn and Bacon. (Original work published 5th)