How Narrative Therapy Can Help You Rewrite How You View Yourself

After experiencing a traumatic event, sometimes finding a way to express what you went through can be challenging. At times, it can feel like no matter how hard you try, you can’t find the right words. Narrative therapy can be useful for those struggling with owning and sharing their story.

Narrative therapy occurs through psychotherapy to enable someone to share their story through empowering language. You become the director of your own mental healthcare through active storytelling.

Understanding Narrative Therapy

This type of therapy helps separate someone from their lived experience. One of the goals is to remove others’ perceptions and blame to help establish their experiences and stories in the present time. Eventually, those going through narrative therapy should be able to understand themselves separately from what’s occurred and realize how the words they use shape their life and identity.

Narrative therapy is a client-driven and strength-based approach to therapy. The therapist will typically help direct the dialogue and conversation with the client about their experience and story.

In this approach, the therapist will focus on the present instead of digging into the past. While it’s important to help understand what occurred in the past, the goal of narrative therapy is to help the client feel more empowered and to help understand why they tell their story the way they do.

Narrative therapy can be beneficial for anyone dealing with complex grief, anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Techniques of Narrative Therapy

Understanding the story

The first thing you and your therapist will do is start from the beginning of your story. In this step, you will tell your therapist the full story and experience and explain your current understanding of the event.

While you’re telling your story, the therapist will listen to the tone and words used to understand your perspective fully. It’s critical to tell the story honestly so the therapist can determine future session goals and understand patterns you may have.

Externalizing your identity and story

After telling your story, the next step will be to separate your identity from your story. The therapist should ask you questions to help understand your goals so that they can reframe your mindset.

Here, you learn how the language you use can be different between your goals and your story. Once you can see the difference in words, you may use the therapist to help talk through how to bridge the gap.

As you start to see patterns in the language you use, it will be easier to change the path of your story. For many people, this will include being more positive and empowered and being gracious to your hurt self.

Breaking down the story

For many people, a traumatic event is complicated. In this step, you will break things down into more manageable and digestible pieces. This will help you and your therapist focus on the main issue and help you feel less overwhelmed.

Recognizing outcomes

Here, you will learn how to identify various outcomes that could contradict your current narrative. This will ultimately put you on the path towards change. In this step, the goal is to shift what can be seen as a problematic narrative to a successful one.

Rewriting your story

Once you’re able to rewrite your story, you will have understood the impact of the language you were previously using. It will also be easier to recognize the changes you want to make between your current story and the new one you want to use moving forward.

At this point, you will be able to see how your former story could be harmful. You can also see how a new outlook can shed a positive light on a negative experience. The key here is to look at things through a positive thought process to empower you to tell your story.

As much as we want to change the past, unfortunately, we cannot do that. Narrative therapy can empower you to love yourself and view your trauma through a new lens. reach out to learn more.