Narrative Therapy
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How telling your story in Narrative Therapy may help heal depression and stress
Whatever its cause, depression or stress can have short- and long-term effects. It can shake the foundations of your identity relationships with others, and philosophy on life as a whole. It can also create patches of mental “fog” where your memory seems vague, disjointed, or absent entirely.
Sometimes, depression or stress can feel too intense and confusing to think deeply about. But narrative therapy can help you get more clarity on past events so your memories become less overwhelming. Once you have a clearer picture, you may find those events easier to understand and cope with.
What are the basics?
According to the philosophy behind narrative therapy, humans tend to make meaning out of their lives by organizing their memories into stories. Narrative therapy then uses those stories to help change how you emotionally react to the past.
Narrative therapy can be used for a range of symptoms and concerns, including:
- anxiety
- relationship conflict
- grief
Instead of recalling the event and then trying to remember details while already stressed, narrative therapy has you build out the context first. In short, you tell your life story from the beginning. Then you can fit the events in the gaps like puzzle pieces.
This method helps your brain anchor the traumatic memories to a specific time and place. Those threats you faced can then become something rooted in the past rather than an ever-present, looming tragedy. Confining those memories inside your narrative can rid them of some of their power.
In addition, lining up all of your experiences can help you consider those moments from a different perspective. Context can change what those memories mean to you.
Why?
Along with symptom resolution, Narrative Therapy is a very helpful modality that allows the therapist to truly partner with the client in their healing journey so that they are not alone. This feeling of being “seen” is extremely potent in therapeutic healing. Additionally, this treatment can have a particularly powerful ability to heal and connect when children and teens are able to present their therapy series to their caregiver, if appropriate. This allows caregivers to “be there now” when they were potentially unable to be there in the past.
Narrative therapy is a form that seeks to help patients identify their values and the skills associated with them. It provides the patient with knowledge of their ability to live these values so they can effectively confront current and future problems. The therapist seeks to help the patient co-author a new narrative about themselves by investigating the history of those values. Narrative therapy claims to be a social justice approach to therapeutic conversations, seeking to challenge dominant discourses that it claims shape people’s lives in destructive ways.