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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