Is Narrative Therapy a good fit for me?

A Clinical Psychologists is trained in a range of therapies, in order to customise sessions based on your unique needs and circumstances (e.g. you might see websites describing these in really long lists like compassion-focused therapy, CBT, psychodynamic therapy... and so on). Among these therapies, Narrative Therapy as an overall umberella approach particularly resonates with my values due to how it tailors conversations to create a good fit to a client’s unique hopes, and its close alignment with a person’s values and culture. Narrative therapy puts what is important to you in the limelight, and what is the most important to you, is important to me as your therapist. People become distressed when their world becomes misaligned with the story of who they are. The word author, comes from the word authority: in our work, we take back the power of telling your life story, and with that, more things become possible and we gain more agency. Narrative Therapy is known as a “both-and” not an “either-or” approach, meaning it is "pluralistic”, we use tools, methods, exercises, ideas and techniques very thoughtfully and carefully from other branches of psychology without neglecting community and cultural wisdom. I draw on multiple therapy approaches and place a strong emphasis on the client’s own approaches in a collaborative way.

You might be living with the effects of a label… such as anxiety, depression, trauma, stress, grief, compulsion, burnout or disorder. However, these labels may not fully capture the nuances of your personal lived experiences, cultural background, familial connections, or spiritual beliefs.

Below you will find some ways Narrative Therapy does things differently. Firstly, a Charter of Narrative Therapy Story Telling Rights to give you a sense of what narrative therapy makes space for. You will also find a List of Close Fitting Descriptions of clients describing in their own words, the big storms of life that fit them better and speak of their values, positions and contexts. You will also find examples from The Dictionary of Obscure Experiences, and words describing of the invisible or unvoiced privileges some people have using the metaphor of Knapsacks of Privilege. Check them out!

Narrative Therapy: Your Story Telling Rights

(Adapted from Denborough, 2015)

1. Everyone has the right to define their experiences and problems in their own words and terms.

2. Everyone has the right to have their life understood in the context of what they have been through and in the context of their relationships with others.

3. Everyone has the right to invite others who are important to them to be involved in the process of reclaiming their life from the effects of hardship.

4. Everyone has the right not to have problems caused by trauma and injustice located inside them, internally, as if there were some deficit in them. The person is not the problem; the problem is the problem. [apologies to Swifites]

5. Everyone has the right to have their responses to hard times acknowledged. No one is a passive recipient of hardship. People always respond. People always protest injustice.

6. Everyone has the right to have their skills and knowledge of survival respected, honored, and acknowledged.

7. Everyone has the right to know and experience that what they have learned through hard times can make a contribution to the lives of others in similar situations.

Close Fitting Descriptions

• There’s a tidal wave of uncertainty out of the blue, and I want solid ground.

• I’ve been given a label but it seems far away from my unique experience. I mean… there’s anxiety, there’s anxiety and there’s anxiety, right?

• The world is pressing down on me, there’s sadness and sorrow all the time.

• I have reason to be really cross and in moments I feel like shouting really loudly.

• Something difficult to describe happened to me… it’s after my attention.

• Even in a place of lots of people, lonliness is there.

• I get angsty, the world seems terrible and even unsafe… little things play on my mind.

• I have the grey tickles of worry and stress… the drepressing black curtain of really low mood.

• Social media is giving me more than just FOMO and steeling my attention.

• Someone really important to me is no longer in my life how they were and I miss who I was in their eyes.

• I’m in a dillemah… my heart says one thing but my culture says the opposite, what do I do?

• There’s a hole in my bucket of contentment… no matter what I fill it with.

• I’m heartbroken. My partner and I are stuck in a rut. The spark is gone.

• The rug has been pulled right from under my feet… and it’s not okay by me actually.

• I’m beat. I feel beaten down on. I don’t have the energy.

• I don’t know where I fit in, where I belong, what to do with my life.

The Dictionary of Obscure Experiences

(Continually updated by Newman, 2021)

• Arse-sumption: When feeling judged by other people for the choices I make when they don’t understand my reasons.

• Dali’s death sentence: Loss or distortion of time due to depression.

• Dry tears: When you’ve been crying for so long that you can’t cry anymore, but you’re still crying.

• Existential balaclava: When you wear a mask for so long that you end up losing a sense of what’s real and what’s not real in yourself. (Ref: Existential; relating to, or affirming existence)
  Synonym. Nothingness: If I don’t have a self, what do I have left?

• Fuck-it moment: When you hit a point and then go a bit further than that point. You know you can’t live like this anymore, that you can’t clean any of this up. You can get a strange motivation or a rush and a sense that you can make it all different, maybe better and do anything, as it doesn’t matter anymore.

• Happysad: When you’re in a sad place, and the sadness around you, be it people, music or books, makes you happier because it consoles your own sadness.

• I hate that I love you: Wanting shitty people back in your life, even after they screw you over.

• Morbid vacation: Wanting to go into a coma and have a break from things; not wanting to die, but not wanting to live.

• Rubik’s Cube of life: When you want things to all line up at the same time and it never does; something always seems to go wrong after one problem gets solved.

• Self-validation paradox: Not wanting to be mentally ill, but wanting to be understood as mentally ill enough to be worthy of treatment.
  Synonym: The ill effect: Not wanting to get better because your relationships, and so your validation, are built on being sick.

• That thing there: When you feel like you have a body, but you don’t really fit in it, it’s an empty shell.

• Unbounded: When I can’t put my emotions into words, as they aren’t structured, they’re everywhere.

• Undeserving sadness: Those times when you feel you don’t deserve to be sad, especially when people are so sick or have been given limited time to live. With good physical health, it feels wrong to not want to live.

Knapsacks of Privilege

(Adapted from McIntosh, 1989 & Duncan, 2015)

On a daily basis, a white person…

• …can be sure if they need legal or medical help their race won’t work against them.

• …can go home from most meetings of organisations they belong to feeling somewhat tied in rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, unincluded, held at a distance or feared.

• …is able to switch on the television and see white people being widely represented in the media.

• …race is not an extra barrier when trying to access opportunities to be heard, included or seen.

• …can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of their race.

• …can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that they got it because of race.

On a daily basis, a straight person…

• …can go home from most meetings, classes, and conversations without feeling excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped or feared because of their sexual orientation.

• …can be open about their sexual orientation without worrying about their job.

• …can be sure that their classes will require curricular materials that testify to the existence of people with their sexual orientation.

• …can count on finding a therapist or doctor willing and able to talk about their sexuality.

• …are not identified by their sexual orientation.

• …can go for months without being called straight / can easily and knowingly see other straight people heterosexual families and couples on a day to day basis.

On a daily basis, a cisgendered person…

• ...do not have to choose between either invisibility ("passing") or being consistently "othered" and/or tokenised based on their gender.

• … their medical establishment does not serve as a "gatekeeper" which disallows self-determination of what happens to their body.

• …is not told that their sexual orientation and gender identity are mutually exclusive.

• …do not have srangers do not ask them what their "real name" [birth name] is and then assume that they have a right to call them by that name.

• …do not have to worry about whether they will be able to find a bathroom to use or whether they will be safe changing in a locker room.