What is Narrative Therapy – A Useful Guide

If we talk about one form of therapy that counseling seekers love the most, it could be the narrative therapy. The narrative therapy is that form of therapy in which the counsellor talks to the seeker in a respectful, motivating, and positively manipulative manner. The narrative therapy aims at making sure that the end person gets a feeling that not everything is bad, not everything is good, but they can certainly change a lot of things, no matter in which situation they are.

What is Narrative Therapy?

For every therapist, the term narrative therapy is different depending on the experience they have. For every person who gets a narrative therapy, the approach changes, but the idea remains same. So the idea behind narrative therapy is to ensure a non-blaming, respectful, problem solving approach while counselling. The narrative therapy aims at making people realize what their capabilities are, skills, and how many opportunities they have in future. And this is what is narrative therapy in short.

How Narrative Therapy helps?

Now that you have known the idea behind narrative therapy, you can easily get an idea how narrative therapy helps. So, let’s talk about all the possible ways in which narrative therapy helps a person.

Although, Narrative Therapy doesn’t aim at solving the problems of the person, it instead creates a bridge between the problem and the person.Thereby, the individual has time to think about his problems from different perspectives.

The narrative therapy is playful and joyful in nature. There are proven case studies that have talked about how narrative therapy has been of a great help.

Some of the situations where narrative therapy has been of good help are:

• Family conflict
• Marital challenges
• Depression
• Anxiety
• PTSD
• Substance Addiction
• Chronic illness
• Work-life stress
• Bipolar disorder
• Grief

Best practices for Narrative Therapy

As we told earlier, Narrative Therapy not only talks about the problem, but it also ensures that the person’s attention is diverted in a way where it doesn’t make them feel bad about the situation.

• Telling the story by putting together a different narrative
  One of the things that Narrative therapists do is listen to the story of the person and then putting together a completely different narrative in order to make them realize something that they have been missing.
  
• Externalization technique This technique initially came from the BhagawadGeeta where Lord Krishna talks about how certain things that happen to you are something that i external and not internal. They are not something that can’t be changed about you. Your behavior and attitude should be able to identify bad things happening as external and not internal.

• The deconstruction technique
  The deconstruction technique is the one that talks about decluttering or removing the layers one by one to understand the major cause of the problem and identify how you can solve them.
  A therapist might ask a lot of questions and it can cause you to feel that things are getting illusionary right now. But, within some time, you will be better able to understand what the causes of the problems are.

So, these were some of the techniques or best practices for narrative therapy that a counsellor can use to make sure that his client identifies the problems and is able to understand it.

And this was all on what is narrative therapy, how it helps, and some of the best practices as well. If you liked this blog, make sure you share it with someone who is looking for such a therapy.