Why narrative practice?

Narrative practice privileges your own knowledges.
It presupposes that you are the expert in your own life, hopes and desires, your commitments and preferences for living, what makes you really shine through, feel joy, purpose, and so on. Therefore, I am not the source of solutions, rather, solutions reside in you, and also in your social networks and contexts.

Narrative therapeutic conversations:

• provide a scaffold to separate you from the problems or problem stories that bring you to consultation, and (re)connect with preferred stories of identity and life.

• involve your values, purposes and principles for living, and the histories and connections to relationships of these values, to establish a firm foundation for you to step into your preferred ways of living.

• engage people who are significant to you in whichever way is possible and desired, for example, through letters or documents (like certificates of achievement), invitation to meetings, performances or ceremonies,
  
  and


• pay attention to your particular historical and cultural contexts and how the these have contributed to problem stories

Please note: although narrative therapeutic dialogues engage your creativity, they are not about 'making up' stories but about putting into words that which is already there, in you, your relationships and contexts, and was not put into words before or, if it was, somehow got lost or other (problem or negative) stories had eclipsed.

More about the Narrative Framework

The Narrative Framework was developed by Michael White (Australia) and David Epston (New Zealand), at the beginning of the 1980's, and it has influences from many sources (including Literary Theory, Anthropology and Sociology and peoples' knowledges). It is best described as a framework because it represents a fundamental change of therapeutic direction led by:

• the principle that people are people, they are not problems, as Michael White put it:  "the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem". For this reason, a central narrative practice is externalising, that is, separating the problems or problem stories from your personal identity. Through this distancing it becomes more possible to examine, take a position, and make a decision or take steps in relation to the problems or problem stories


• the idea that we co-construct our realities (including who we are) through language (the stories we tell, hear, share), relationships and contexts. For this reason, the re-telling to an audience, the sharing of new and preferred possibilities for being and living, supports the establishment of these alternative stories and extends their reach beyond the therapeutic conversation into your community and social contexts
  
  and


• a centrality of ethics and an awareness that therapeutic conversations, and our place in these and in the world, are never neutral. For this reason, we have a responsibility, both, to not reproduce within therapeutic dialogues the oppressive contexts which have brought people to consult with us, and to work with them to transform these contexts

Click on the link to read Michael White's notes on Narrative Therapy.