Narrative Therapy: Rewriting Your Story

How we think, feel is greatly effected by the stories that we tell about ourselves and other people…

Giving Meaning to Events

Generally speaking, the mind desires certainly and is always looking for patterns that might help us to predict or understand the world in an effort to get what we want and avoid the things we do not want. In seeking out an explanation for our life’s events, we create a theory in order to make sense of them, and whenever we give meaning to a series of events, we create a story.

Everyone has many stories going on at once. We have personal stories about who we are, about our relationships, about our past, present and future but we also have family stories, community stories, religious and national stories. Narrative therapy is based on the idea that how we think, feel and behave is greatly effected by these stories. Narrative therapy acknowledges that:

People are the experts of their own lives
The “problem” is in the story and not in the person
Many different meanings can be given to the same events
The meaning we give past events directs the interpretation of future events
Our stories are being written and rewritten, challenged and revised all the time
People have many skills, beliefs and abilities that they already use to affect positive change in their relationship with inner problems (thoughts, feelings and ideas) and outer problems (situations)

We’re constantly negotiating meaning in our conversations. For example, think of two people who see a movie together. One person loved it, and the other didn’t. They saw and heard the same things, so what causes one to like it and the other not? What make it an enjoyable experience for one person and not the other? Well it’s their perception. As they talk about what they liked or didn’t like about it, and why, they influence each other’s thoughts, feelings and perspective, often by proposing different meanings or interpretations of the characters and events. The same process is conducted in narrative therapy but is done consciously and deliberately to arrive at a healthier, more desirable perspective of oneself and one’s life that better fulfils the preferred narrative. In therapy, the intention isn’t to arrive at the “correct” understanding or interpretation, but a more functional, more desirable one. This is done by asking ourselves questions and exploring how our interpretation makes us feel and what affects it has on us.

The Principles of Narrative Therapy

The therapist wants to create a safe space in which the client feels comfortable to share their story, and hopes to respond in a way that supports the client in feeling seen, heard and accepted. If it’s the first time they’re telling their story, there can be a lot of therapeutic value in just putting it to words as this may allow emotion to surface and be released. It can also make the person conscious of an explicit meaning, fear or desire which was previously subconscious or implicit.

More often than not, these untold stories are characterised by pain, suffering, struggle and resistance. It’s often a big step for us to share a story like this for the very first time and it might be painful, relieving, or both. Once the client’s told their story, the therapist helps them explore the meaning given to this series of events. They discuss together the desirable and undesirable elements of the story and how believing the story has affected them. In this way they determine if the story is functional (leading toward happiness) or dysfunctional (leading toward unhappiness).

Generally speaking, we tend to believe our thoughts are an accurate representation of the way things are, or to put it simply, we tend to believe what our thoughts are telling us. For this reason we probably have a lot of confidence in the meaning we’ve applied to the events, and it can be difficult to change our perspective without first cultivating some doubt in our thoughts. We cultivate this doubt by questioning. For example, “how does that make you feel that way?”, “how do you know that’s true, is it true all the time?”. We can also look for cognitive distortions like emotional reasoning (using ones own feelings as proof of something) and generalisation. For example, by pointing out the clients use of words like “always”, “never”, “everyone” and “no one”, it helps them see the conclusion they’ve come to isn’t as solid as they thought and creates an opening for a new interpretation.

From here, the client may bring forward new interpretations of the same events, or bring forth other memories and examples that hadn’t been considered, which either contradict the undesirable meanings or which support a more desirable conclusion. Re-authoring the story and attributing to it a different meaning will then inspire different thoughts, feelings and behaviours more aligned with the client’s values and desires

All Stories are Co-Created

The stories we tell ourselves don’t appear out of thin air. We’re born into a particular time and place, to a particular family and culture, already full of stories, which give context to our own. It’s not as if all the possible meanings we could attribute to our life’s events appear before us to choose from. Most of of our interpretations are a conditioned reaction and not a conscious decision. We often do not see alternative meanings at all, or we only see a few, when there could be many. How we “make meaning” of events depends on our previous experience. Everything we know is learned, including how we think about and relate to our own thoughts and feelings.

Many of our personal stories are defined by, or find their context in larger cultural narratives, some of which are contradictory. All the generalisations and stereotypes you’ve ever been exposed to, about gender, race, sexuality, religion, nation, class, and so forth, are stories told by other people. If we internalise these stories and their meanings, then our personal story gets defined by whether or not it’s aligned with them. For example, if everyone around us measures success on financial wealth and we internalise that idea, then the story that we tell ourselves about our own success will be affected by that, and if we’re “poor”, then our story might become, “I am unsuccessful”.

Our story is affected by what other people think, feel, say and do. Likewise, everything we say and do, can, and does influence the stories of other people. When we challenge stereotypes and generalisations by criticising them or embodying another way of being, we effectively weaken the collective conviction in that particular story. For example, by understanding that what people really want is to be happy, you might measure your success in peace of mind rather than material things, thereby escaping the pressure and stress you felt before to make more money and buy more things.

Our Stories Become Self-Fulfilling

Dominant narratives are the beliefs we have about ourselves, others and life in general that form reoccurring themes in our interpretation of events. These beliefs affect what we consider note worthy, what we remember and what we don’t remember. This makes us less likely to take notice of (or even remember) those experience and events that could contradict the story that we’ve told ourself (see filtering).

For example, let’s say as a student we were criticised in gym class for “not being good at sports”, and on several occasions we were chosen last by the other students to play. If we internalise the idea that, “we’re not good at sports”, our thoughts, feelings and behaviour begin to change. It’s possible we feel as if we need to try harder to gain acceptance and prove to them, or ourselves, that they’re wrong. It’s also possible we’ll feel discouraged and avoid opportunities to participate.

With this thought in mind we become hypersensitive to perceived failure and each instance is then added to the bank of evidence supporting the idea “we’re not good at sports”. Any success we have, or progress we make is likely to be minimised, considered “not enough”, or overlooked completely so long as we believe “I’m not good at sports”. We may even convince ourselves that we don’t like sports, rather than confront the feelings of inadequacy that playing sports stirs up, and this can have far reaching consequences, like not playing sports with our kids in later life.

The stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, what we like, what we don’t like, what we’re good at, and what we’re not good at it, in many ways become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our beliefs lead us to think, feel and behave in ways that make those things seem true.

For example, feeling discouraged can lead us to practice less, which leads to not performing as well as we would like, which supports the thought “we’re not good at sports”. This is why it’s important to bring doubt into the narrative, in order to escape the bias that causes us to manifest what we think is true.

One way we bring doubt into the story is in realising the measurement by which we come to these conclusions cannot be defined, or is completely arbitrary. For example, we may feel unloved, or unloveable, and yet our parents love us, or a friend loves us. How many people do we need to love us? How many people need to think we’re a good person for us to “be a good person”, and how many people need to think of us as a “bad person” to make us a bad person? The more we examine the reasoning behind the conclusions we have come to, the more we begin to see how relative they are. We begin to see that what we think affects how we feel, but doesn’t change the facts of the story. Of course, the skill is in separating facts from interpretations and not confusing the two.

Our Resistance to Negative Interpretations

While part of us believes the negative or self-limiting narrative we have, our inherent wish to be truly happy causes us to resist them. In fact, we are in perpetual resistance to fully accepting negative conclusions about ourself and life. Our responding to negative ideas and unwanted events with negative emotions is proof of our resistance and reluctance to believe these thoughts.

For example, if we were able to believe and accept that we’re unworthy, unloveable, or “not good enough”, we would, paradoxically, be at peace. We would think, “I’m not good enough, and that’s okay”. The fact these thoughts upset us, that they make us feel sad, angry, or ashamed, indicate we don’t accept them. The fact we often seek validation through our own achievements or through others feelings for us means we’re searching on some level for evidence with which to challenge our self-destructive notions. The therapist’s role is to exploit these acts of resistance in deconstructing the undesirable narrative and in creating a new more desirable narrative that is largely independent of relying on external measurements.

Try it For Yourself

Remember, in narrative therapy, the person isn’t the problem, it’s the story. The term ‘externalisation’ refers to the process of attributing “the problem” to the situation, or even the behaviour, as opposed to the very nature of the person. There are several ways to practice this.

One thing you can do is start noticing and changing the language you use to describe your feelings. For example, instead of saying “I am angry”, you could say, “I am feeling angry”, but even better if you say, “I am aware of anger”. This helps you relate to yourself as an aware presence, and the anger as something external to you. This helps you to be curious about the anger and its causes without judging yourself for “being angry”.

In keeping with this line of thinking, try noticing each time you think or say the words, “I am…” or “they are…“, “he is…“, “she is…” and so forth as these statements often involve many assumptions and generalisations. Not only that, but we can’t change what we are anymore than a rose can change what it is. So when we say the words, “I am”, it implies a kind of permanence.

By saying for example, “I am a bad communicator” we make ourself the problem. It doesn’t suggest the possibility of a solution because you’re stating that is what you are. Here, externalisation could take the form of thinking, “I find it difficult to communicate when…” or “I find it easier to communicate when…”. By thinking in this way, you acknowledge that you are not the problem and that change is possible. This helps you to avoid feeling embarrassed, ashamed or frustrated with yourself.