Narrative Therapy: Home

As the name suggests, Narrative Therapy is a form of counseling that focuses on learning and cultivating a client's own self-created narratives about their lives. Narrative Therapy views the client as a story-teller who selects among the events of their own lines for the defining patterns and events, and assigns these events meaning. These meanings can be helpful or harmful, hopeful or "problem-centered." Crucially, the therapist does not preside over a session with a client as the expert in charge of assigning a verdict or scientific diagnosis to the patient's problems. Rather, the therapists seeks to come alongside the client to discover how the stories the client has chosen to tell themselves have shaped their lives and discover new ones, new threads of identity, possibility, and hope. This collaborative process is often known as "re-authoring" or "re-storying": the client chooses to lay aside certain problem-centered stories ("I'm a bad parent," "I'll never be good for anything") and choose new, truer, more helpful ones.

• Narrative Therapy treats the client as a free agent always capable of choosing a new interpretation to the stories which shape their lives, and so a new way forward.  New Zealand therapist Michael White, one of the founders of Narrative Therapy, notes that "Narrative practices respect people as the experts of their own lives." The therapist's job is to provide context to these lives, to mine them for new stories, not to impose a new "objective" or "scientific" one. Therapy is a creative, collaborative process, where the client teaches the therapist about their lives and the therapist provides fresh interpretations and new directions of inquiry.
• Narrative Therapy acknowledges that humans are "interpreting" beings, always choosing among many possible interpretations that give meaning to their lives. People are made-up of the stories they tell themselves, and these stories are only a few of the infinite number of possible stories, possible explanations for a life. These stories may be self-created, but many also come from a client's  religious, familial, cultural, and social background. So, while Narrative Therapists seek to assert a client's own freedom and sense of agency in the face of "problem-centered" narratives, they also must be aware of a client's own inherited beliefs, and be sensitive to how these beliefs shape a client's own story.
• Narrative Therapy by its very nature is "non-pathologizing," meaning it does not diagnose clients with disorders or mental illnesses. A Narrative Therapist will never attempt to assign a client with a single story, a single "objective" explanation or interpretation for their problems and behaviors. Narrative Therapy argues that the modernistic diagnostic approach to counseling de-centers the client and removes all sense of agency and ownership: a client simply is an "addict," or "clinically depressed" and most likely always will be. While Narrative Therapy acknowledges that such diagnoses might be appropriate and helpful in some circumstances, it also argues that diagnoses can further embed hopeless, problem-centered narratives of self in a client. The Narrative Therapist seeks to help a client rediscover their own freedom by showing them that there are many stories that make up their lives, not just one.