The interviews end and the therapist gives the consultant a certificate that says:
This is to certify that Raquel has mastered the lie that got her into so much trouble. The following people have noticed the change: Carlos, José, Manuel, Laura and Soledad. In Cáceres on April 20.
Narrative therapy was recognized outside Australia, where it was created, by White and Epston’s (1993) well-known book Narrative Media for Therapeutic Purposes. These authors used certificates, letters and all types of documents to externalize the problem and give the person more space to create an identity different from the one the problem proposed.
Since then, narrative therapy has gone through a period of growth in application contexts, as well as conceptual richness that have made it very attractive to psychotherapy professionals.
In this article we are going to see some basic notions to understand narrative practice.
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Understanding narrative therapy
In many places the definition of narrative therapy appears as a respectful and non-blaming approach that places people as experts of their own lives (Morgan, 2004). This entails a change in conceptualization regarding who seeks help. He is not called a patient, nor is he called a client, but rather he is called a “co-author” of the therapy process (White, 2004).
The problem is the problem and the person is the person.
With this term Michael White wants to question the position of the therapist as an expert and, therefore, questions his explicit and implicit superiority over the person who seeks his help. Co-author is someone who helps the therapist understand the situation by dismantling the prejudices inherent to the profession, race, social class, gender, etc., facilitating self-description of the problem.
In this way, the person’s discourse, their story, becomes fundamental for the narrative therapist, accompanied by a reflective analysis of the position they occupy and the need not to impose their criteria on the life of the consultants (another term which is used to refer to people who request our help). Gergen (1996) calls it self-narrative and by that “it refers to the explanation that an individual presents of the relationship between self-relevant events over time” (p. 233).
With the concept of co-author and questioning the role of the therapist as an expert, Michel White gives way to another theoretical foundation of narrative practices: the valuation of local or popular knowledge. Based on anthropological works by Gregory Bateson, Cliford Geertz and Bárbara Myerhoff, to name some of the most relevant, and on philosophical reflections by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, White (2002) highlights that in the teaching of professional disciplines, not only are local or popular knowledge, but it is also disqualified, forgetting the history of the people and communities and discarding the wisdom, resources, values, attitudes, etc., that each person and each community put into play to confront conflictive situations. Collective narrative practice that works with communities arises from the appreciation of popular wisdom.
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To give an example of the above, we can cite the prevalence of the model of grief treatment according to Western schools of psychology and psychiatry over the local knowledge of the Australian aborigines or the Gypsies, imposing the production of a catharsis to free oneself from suffering. due to the loss or detachment of the personal belongings of the deceased person to “say goodbye correctly”, without respecting the customs and ways of resolving grief in different cultures. The above would lead to poor descriptions (lean in some translations) referring to an interpretation of reality with limitations, compared to rich descriptions (dense in some translations) referring to more complete interpretations of the person’s reality.
“a person’s actions are descriptions that exclude the interpretations of those who are participating in his actions… lean descriptions are typically those arrived at through the “observations” of people considered outsiders, who are studying the lives of others. people and the communities in which they live… conversely, thick descriptions of people’s actions are descriptions informed by the interpretations of those who are participating in those actions…” (M. White, 2002: 32; cited in Montes , 2011)
The poor/rich binomial (lean/dense, in English thin/rich) is fundamental in narrative practice. The person in the problem tells a poor story of his experience, which constitutes the story of the problem. The person’s identity is saturated by the description that the problem makes of them to themselves and to others. Narrative therapy aims to enrich the story by introducing those details that have been left out due to the predominance of the problem, that is, the co-creation with the patient of an alternative story.
In this way, some important premises of narrative practice emerge.
Premises of narrative therapy
- The problem is the problem and the person is the person, this causes the problems to be analyzed separately from people and it is assumed that people have many skills, abilities, competencies, beliefs, values and commitments that will help them change their relationship with the problems in their lives. Externalization of the problem is one of the best-known techniques of narrative therapy (although from narrative practice it is seen more as a worldview than as a technique)
- The word story has to do with a series of events that are related through a temporal sequence and that are in accordance with a certain plot. We interpret what happens to us and give it meaning by uniting certain facts to give it meaning. This final sense would form the plot of the story. To reach that final meaning we have had to choose certain events and leave others out, probably because they do not fit with the plot of the story.
- The stories through which we make sense of our experience are influenced above all by cultural and social factors.
- Language serves as a mediator in these interpretive processes: through it we define and maintain our thoughts and feelings (including our internal monologue).
- Stories shape our lives and drive or impede certain actions. This is what we call the effects of dominant history. We live several stories at the same time, we cannot explain our lives only from one point of view, that is why we consider that human beings have lives with multiple stories. This allows the creation of an alternative history.
Creating alternative history
As can be seen, the co-creation between therapist and client of an alternative story to the problem is the key point of narrative practice. We can reach an alternative history, introducing aspects, acts, people, etc. that were left out of the dominant story, through the exploration and deconstruction of what keeps the problem as the dominant story in the life of the person who consults us. Deconstruction is achieved through reflective questions to narrate and re-tell the story that lead to the discovery of so-called “isolated achievements.” Those isolated achievements together constitute the alternative history, a history that provides a different identity than the one intended by the problem, constituted by the moments when the problem has not had as strong an influence or has had no influence at all.
Storytelling practice is a rich field of growth in all areas of a relationship.
There are many ways to create the alternative story and narrative practice has grown in techniques that make it easier for the therapist to co-construct it with the client. Some well-known techniques are: externalization conversations, remembrance conversations, re-authoring conversations, definition ceremonies, the use of certificates, documents, songs, poems, etc., therapeutics, the tree of life, the team of life, the comet of life, etc.
Narrative practice is a rich field of growth in all areas of a helping relationship, at the individual, couple, family and community levels. It is worth it for professionals to continue exploring the different possibilities it offers.
About the Author: Dr Carlos Chimpén is a professor at the and . You can write to him at the following address:
Bibliographic references
Gergen, K., J. (1996). Realities and relationships, approaches to social construction. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Montes, JG (2011). From knowledge to power in therapy. The narrative of a suicide attempt survivor and his mother. Electronic scientific journal of psychology, no. 11, July, pp. 340-356.
Morgan, A. (2004). What is narrative therapy? An easy-to-read introduction. Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich Center Publications.
White and Epston (1993). Narrative Media for therapeutic purposes. Barcelona: Paidós.
White, M. (2002). The narrative approach in the therapists’ experience. Barcelona: Gedisa.
White, M. (2004). Guides for systemic family therapy. Barcelona: Gedisa.