NARRATIVE THERAPY: WHAT IS IT AND HOW DOES IT WORK? - ECONOMÍA - 2025

The Narrative Therapy is a type of psychotherapy that is given from a non - invasive and respectful perspective that no blame or victimizes the person, teaching him that she is the expert on her own life.

It arose between the 70s and 80s by the Australian Michael White and the New Zealander David Epston. It is classified within the third generation therapies, also called third wave, along with other therapeutic methods such as Metacognitive Therapy, Functional Analytical Psychotherapy or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

It is normally used in family therapy, although its application has already been extended to other fields such as education and social or community.

Narrative Therapy proposes a change when it comes to identifying who seeks help. For White (2004), he is no longer called a patient or client, as in other therapeutic approaches, but is called a co-author of the therapy process.

This role of the person during the therapy process will help you to discover for yourself all your abilities, capacities, beliefs and values ​​that will help you reduce the influence of problems in your life.

Thus, the authors, White and Epston, question the position of the therapist as an expert, yielding this position to the person or co-author, who will help the therapist to understand the situation through self-description of the problem.

In the same way, Narrative Therapy tries to empower culture and popular knowledge. According to White (2002), other disciplines forget the history of people and social groups, marginalize and even disqualify them, discarding those values, resources and attitudes typical of the culture used to face problematic situations.

People tend to interpret and give meaning to the experiences of daily life in order to explain everything that happens and give it meaning. This meaning can become the subject of a story (narrative).

Postulates of narrative therapy

1- Differentiation of the problem and the person

One of the arguments on which Narrative Therapy is based is that the person is never the problem and this is understood as something external to the person.

Thus, people's separate problems are analyzed, assuming that they have the ability, capacity and commitment to change their relationship with the problems in their lives.

The externalization of the problem is one of the best known techniques in this type of therapy. Consisting of the linguistic separation of the problem and the personal identity of the individual.

2- Social and cultural influence

The stories created by people to make sense of their experience are influenced by cultural and social factors.

3- The plot of your story

When developing a story, those events that are related through a temporal sequence and that agree with the plot are taken into account. Thus, what happens is interpreted and meaning is given through the union of certain facts that will give meaning to the story.

This sense is the argument and in order to achieve it, different facts and events have been chosen and others discarded that, perhaps, did not fit with the story's argument.

4- Language as a mediator

Interpretive processes are developed through language, as thoughts and feelings are defined.

5- Effects of the dominant story

The stories are those that shape the life of the person and promote or prevent the performance of certain behaviors, this is known as the effects of the dominant story.

Life cannot be explained only from one point of view, hence several different stories are lived at the same time. Therefore, people are considered to have multiple story lives that allow them to create an alternative history.

Narrative method

Narrative Therapy uses the beliefs, skills and knowledge of the person as a tool to solve problems and recover their life.

The goal of the narrative therapist is to help clients examine, evaluate, and change their relationship to problems by posing questions that help people to externalize their problems and then investigate them.

As more information about problems is investigated and learned, the person will discover a set of values ​​and principles that will provide support and a new approach to life.

The narrative therapist uses questions to guide conversations and to examine in depth how problems have influenced the person's life. Starting from the premise that although it is a recurring and serious problem, it has not yet completely destroyed the person.

In order for the person to stop seeing the problems as the center of his life, the therapist will encourage the person to look for in his story all those aspects that he tends to miss and focus his attention on them, thus reducing the importance of the problems. Later, invite the person to take an empowering stance on the problem and then retell the story from that new point of view.

As therapy progresses, the client should record their findings and progress.

In Narrative Therapy the participation of external witnesses or listeners is common during consultation sessions. These may be friends or family of the person or even former clients of the therapist who have experience and knowledge of the problem to be treated.

During the first interview, only the therapist and the client intervene, while the listeners cannot comment, only listen.

In subsequent sessions, they can already express what they stand out from what was told by the client and if it has any relation to their own experience. Subsequently, it will be the client who does the same with what is reported by external witnesses.

In the end, the person realizes that the problem they present is shared by others and learns new ways to continue with their life.

Narrative thinking VS logical-scientific thinking

The logical-scientific thinking is based on procedures and theories endorsed and verified by the scientific community. It promulgates the application of formal logic, rigorous analysis, discoveries that start from reasoned hypotheses and empirically tested to achieve general and universal truth conditions and theories.

On the other hand, narrative thinking includes stories characterized by their realism since they start from the experience of the person. Its objective is not to establish conditions of truth or theories, but a succession of events through time.

White and Epston (1993) distinguish the differences between both types of thinking by focusing on different dimensions:

Personal experience

The classification and diagnosis systems defended by the logical-scientific point of view, end up eliminating the particularities of personal experience. While narrative thinking gives greater importance to lived experience.

According to Turner (1986) “The type of relational structure that we call <> emerges only when we relate the present experience with the accumulated result of past experiences, similar or at least relevant of similar power ”.

Weather

Logical-scientific thinking does not take into account the temporal dimension by focusing on generating universal laws that are considered true in all times and places.

In contrast to this, the temporal dimension is key in the narrative mode of thought since the stories exist based on the development of events through time. Stories have a beginning and an end and between these two points is where time passes. Thus, for a meaningful account to be given, the events must follow a linear sequence.

Language

Logical-scientific thinking makes use of technicalities, thus eliminating the possibility that context influences the meanings of words.

On the other hand, narrative thinking incorporates language from the subjective point of view, with the intention that each one give it its own meaning. It also incorporates descriptions and colloquial expressions in opposition to the technical language of logical-scientific thought.

Personal agency

While logical-scientific thinking identifies the individual as someone passive whose life develops based on the action of the different internal or external forces. The narrative mode sees the person as the protagonist of their own world, capable of shaping their life and relationships at will.

Observer position

The logical-scientific model starts from objectivity, so it excludes the observer's view of the facts.

On the other hand, narrative thinking gives more weight to the role of the observer by considering that life stories must be constructed through the eyes of the protagonists.

Practice

According to White and Epston (1993), the therapy carried out from narrative thought:

1. It gives the utmost importance to the person's experiences.
2. It favors the perception of a changing world by placing the experiences lived in the temporal dimension.
3. It invokes the subjunctive mood by triggering presuppositions, establishing implicit meanings, and generating multiple perspectives.
4. Stimulates the diversity of meanings of words and the use of colloquial, poetic and picturesque language in the description of experiences and in the attempt to construct new stories.
5. It invites you to adopt a reflective stance and appreciate the participation of each one in the interpretive acts.
6. It fosters a sense of authorship and re-authorship of one's own life and relationships by telling and retelling one's own story.
7. He recognizes that stories are co-produced and tries to establish conditions in which the "object" becomes a privileged author.
8. Consistently introduce the pronouns "I" and "you" in the description of events.

The re-authoring process

According to White (1995), the process of re-authoring or rewriting life is a collaborative process in which therapists must carry out the following practices:

• Adopt a collaborative co-authorship position.
• Help clients see themselves as separate from their problems through outsourcing.
• Help clients to remember those moments in their lives in which they did not feel oppressed by their problems, the so-called extraordinary events.
• Expand descriptions of these extraordinary events with questions about the "landscape of action" and the "landscape of consciousness."
• Connect the extraordinary events to other events in the past and extend this story into the future to form an alternative narrative in which the self is seen as more powerful than the problem.
• Invite significant members of your social network to witness this new personal narrative.
• Document these new practices and insights that support this new personal narrative through literary means.

• Allow other people, trapped by identical oppressive narratives, to benefit from this new knowledge through receiving and returning practices.

Criticisms of Narrative Therapy

Narrative Therapy is the subject of many criticisms due, among other things, to its theoretical and methodological inconsistency:

• It is criticized for maintaining a social constructionist belief that there are no absolute truths, but socially sanctioned points of view.
• There is concern that Narrative Therapy gurus are too critical of other therapeutic approaches, trying to ground their postulates.
• Others criticize that Narrative Therapy does not take into account the personal biases and opinions that the narrative therapist possesses during therapy sessions.
• It is also criticized for the lack of clinical and empirical studies to validate its claims. In this sense, Etchison and Kleist (2000) defend that the qualitative results of Narrative Therapy are not congruent with the findings of most of the empirical studies carried out, so it lacks a scientific basis that can support its efficacy.

References

1. Carr, A., (1998), Michael White's Narrative Therapy, Contemporary Family Therapy, 20, (4).
2. Freedman, Jill and, Combs, Gene (1996). Narrative Therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-70207-3.
3. Montesano, A., The narrative perspective in systemic family therapy, Revista de Psicoterapia, 89, 13, 5-50.
4. Tarragona, M., (2006), Postmodern therapies: a brief introduction to collaborative therapy, narrative therapy and solution-focused therapy, Behavioral Psychology, 14, 3, 511-532.
5. Payne, M. (2002) Narrative Therapy. An introduction for professionals. Barcelona: Paidós.
6. White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. NY: WW Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-70516-4
7. White, M., Epston, D., (1993), Narrative media for therapeutic purposes, 89-91, Barcelona: Paidós.