Narrative Therapy

Narrative Therapy is developed by an Australian family therapist Michael White and a New Zealand family therapist David Epston in late 1980’s. Our stories of life talk about who we are, why we are here, and what we can do from our lives. When we see ourselves who are in healthy stories, we can change our lives and develop ourselves as healthy life stories.

            Narrative Therapy is a form of psychotherapy that is using narratives, and it is based on therapy and storytelling of one’s experiences, and also has specific meaning with using stories. Narrative Therapy holds identities that are shaped by the accounts of our lives that are found in the stories. Narrative therapy reflects multistories of our identities and related meanings.

            A meaning of Narrative Therapy relates to relatively recent way of thinking about the nature of human life and knowledge, and it believes there is no one objective ‘truth’ and there are multiple interpretations. Therefore, therapy has limitations of knowing something, and it is only interpretation of one’s perspective of other person’s experience. In other words, we are focusing on the process of interpretation from related meaning of experience.

            Narrative context are made up of event occurring overtime. Important aspects of Narrative Therapy philosophy is analysis of social power. According to the Murdock (2013), it states that the power and knowledge are inseparable because of the phrase “a domain of knowledge is a domain of power and domain of power is a domain of knowledge.” (p.495).

            For the key constructs, a series of stories are created over time through attempts to connect event in our experiences and those events become privileged and dominant story which is problem saturated story. Adjectives of thinness that contains few events and alternative stories and thickness that contains very elaborate and rich in nature refer to the qualities of the stories that people tell about. In the conversation, people talk about some event and experience. The event has them and construction through the time processing. Through the externalizing conversation, people can name the problem to assess effects of life. They can know how it works in the life relates to earliest history. The unique outcome refers that the event is not a part of story, but it become part of preferred story as a therapy goal. This construct use many detailed questions to have description of outcomes as an action, reflection, and new experience. Re-authoring is affected identities and the meanings that were connected each other. However, Narrative therapy focuses on the identities than related meaning. The experience and ability can use as making new story, and it assist to resolve problems.