Therapy Story Time

Your story begins with you.

Then life came along.

You had successes and failures, hopes dashed and dreams fulfilled, people helped you and tore you down.
Our life narrative is the story of how the personality we are born with responds to the external factors that have influenced us over time, positive and negative.
This life narrative is the basis for where our presumptions about life come from. Often, these presumptions are negative and plant seeds for negative reactions in the future.

The experience of counselling therapy, especially in the assessment stage of the first few sessions, is really where the client tells this story. The story that has brought them to counselling.

Through the use of inquisitive questioning, the counsellor will work with the client to reveal the presumptive beliefs in their personal narrative that are causing their current problem.

Narrative Therapy is an approach that counsellors can use to encourage clients to rewrite the story that created their problems. Then they are free to start a new chapter in their life story. A less problem-focused story.

The problem is the problem
Not you!

The first stage of Narrative Therapy is to understand what the problem is. For example, say you have a problem with aggressive anger. Traditionally, a therapist may say you are an angry person; with NT, this becomes that you have a problem with anger.
Anger is not you; it is a problem that you have, which can be removed by removing your need for it. That need is based on your historical experience and reactions in life.

This externalisation process is not addressing the problem and removing responsibility from the client to deal with the negativity of aggressive anger. It is enabling the client to step outside their problem, to develop a more objective view of what is wrong and how to put it right.

There are various tools a client may use in identifying the current problem’s historic roots in their life.

A client may be encouraged to write their life story as a kind of life review. What were the specific stages or chapters in their life where unhelpful presumptions were added to their story?

How did these presumptions about themselves and others become core beliefs that have resulted in the current problematic situation?
The Tree of Life is a good representation of this tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HicCAN1Socw

A client may map their current problem experience onto a diagram of their areas of life, such as college, family, work, friends, etc. This is called a positioning map, where the problem and its effects are “positioned” in the client’s current life. Other maps can be drawn that help the client to visualise how to move their position in relation to their problem. eventually, the client will end with the preferred map, their preferred narrative.

For more info, click this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd8TFrf4wUo
I personally would call this a spider diagram, where the client writes the problem experience in the middle and positions how it is affecting them in all the key areas of their life.

Change the ending to the story

Once the problem is identified, the client is encouraged to find unique exceptions in their life that are contrary to the predominant narrative they have lived by.

By using probing questions, the counselling therapist uses these unique exceptions to help the client build a new story, a preferred story. This new narrative can not change the past, but it does help the client to change direction and set a new course where dealing with the triggers of the problem is more manageable.

The counsellor helps the client to deconstruct the old narrative, which was the soil in which the seed of the current problem grew.
This process focuses on working with the client to identify what attitudes, behaviours and feelings were not helpful for the client.
As that work is being done, contradictions that do not lie within the general negative story are found. These contradictions are the roots of a new, more positive story reflecting resilience and problem management rather than defeat and negative behaviours.

Narrative Therapy motivates change through attracting the client to see new possibilities and that they can be achieved.
The client is in charge of making this decision. It is their choice what way they want the story of their life to go. This process is called re-authoring.

To engrain this new narrative into the client’s life, it is shared with others so as to be seen as real in the client’s life. This sharing is done primarily by living out the new way of living in their community.
The client can talk, message or even write a letter to the key people in the relevant areas of their life that they may already have done map work on.

How will your story end?

With Narrative Therapy, that is entirely down to you.

This model is suited to people who like to use creative, outside-of-the-box thinking. Using these skills, they can delve into a deep level of personal understanding.

Whether they are visual or writing-based based with their skills, they can make a physical representation of the changes they want to make and how to get there. Seeing their therapy, so to speak, is very engaging and empowering.

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More insights into the work of counselling

If you’re considering starting therapy, ‘Counselling: How it Begins’ walks through the early steps.

For people who worry they ‘won’t know what to say’, ‘Counselling when you are a person of few words’ might reassure you.
One of the approaches I draw on is CBT, which I outline in ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’

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Further reading
https://positivepsychology.com/narrative-therapy/#narrative-therapy-treatment-plan

Corey, Gerald (2016). Theory and Practice of Counselling and Psychotherapy. CENGAGE Learning