Narrative Therapy and Narrative Focused Trauma Care 101
What are the stories that have significantly shaped your life? When we think about our lives and how we’ve gotten to where we are today, I am willing to bet that, upon reflection, you would share stories of important or momentous events to explain how you’ve gotten to where you are. Narrative Therapy This is the essence of the therapeutic approach called Narrative Therapy. The important, tragic, significant, and painful events in our lives are not isolated. Rather, they are connected, intertwined, and most importantly, they form the story that is your life. Do you believe that you have a story to tell? In every story, there are characters, side characters, and a plotline. Each character plays a role in the story. Each character has a specific purpose, and each leaves an impact, whether implicitly or explicitly. In the plotline of each story, it is often the implicit impact that does the most damage due to the initial invisibility of its mark. The invisibility of the marks themselves is commonly the thing we are left trying to make sense of in the aftermath of an event in our lives. How we interpret the events in the story itself is equally a product of the stories that shape us. In essence, we are not formed in isolation. How we think, how we act, and how we interpret certain feelings or things that happen to us are all informed by the stories we have. The purpose of Narrative Therapy is to help a person take in the full scope of their life. It is designed as a non-pathologizing approach that helps individuals separate themselves from the problems they face, to reframe how they think about his or her life to develop new perspectives. This therapeutic process understands a person’s life as [...]