Narrative Therapy: What we seldom explored.
Stories have been an integral part of our life, stories entertain us, with stories we unbounded our imagination. Our grandparents ingrained moral values in us through stories and were pretty successful in building habits in us through stories, isn't it? Stories were narrated with emotional tonality and feelings created a visual to play in mind. During childhood, stories were fascinating made us see all the great possibilities arousing energy of superheroes in us, any challenging situation also was a play. We as children used this imagination creativity to build our psychological and emotional proficiencies preparing us to understand the world. As we grow, we go through life multiple events and experiences we perceived the events based on how they made us feel at that moment and created a story in our mind. These stories were influential in our day-to-day functioning in life, relationships, work, and intrapersonal intelligence. Due to these stories, we developed our beliefs made opinions judged ourselves & the people around us. We created our mind patterns based on these patterns our thinking formed. Let’s see below some of the thinking patterns:
Overgeneralization — Making a generic rule based on one event
Filtering — Pay attention to only selective negative information ignoring the positive.
Polarized Thinking — They are not open to alternative ways of thinking, they feel too good or unworthy
Emotional Reasoning — They make beliefs based on how they feel.
People self throttle in the above pattern as these patterns can be counter-productive causing chronic stress, anxiety, depression, attention deficit, and Post Stress Traumatic Disorder.
My entire intent is to talk to you about how you can project out these internalized stories observe how our perceptions were formed and how we gave our story our own meaning and believed this to be right, we compelled others to believe our stories. If people believed our stories we felt we are loved and cared for. If people didn't agree with our stories we felt unworthy ending up blaming ourselves or others. This discussion will aid in shifting our mindset thus our decision-making abilities, relationships, behaviors, and experiences are not negatively impacted.
In the 1980s New Zealand-based therapists Michael White and David Epston introduced Narrative Therapy, which allows people to unravel their taxing stories narrating their experiences capturing the learnings, and heal the past.
Techniques for Narrative Therapy
Sharing with you few simple and effective techniques on how Narrative therapy can be used in healing
Assimilation of Narratives
Therapists collaborate with clients assimilating their stories probing helping the client to explore the experiences how the events were perceived and the meanings they placed over their experiences. During this process, the client is slowly analyzing his story with therapists as an observer discovering where the dominant beliefs were formed.
External Representation of Story
Let out your inner child! When an internal story is given a visual form or penned down verbally it gives a better approach to make observations on mental conditioning, one can view the same story with a different point of view from distancing these stories from the mind hence challenges are better identified. Tools like doodling, infographics, journalling & mind maps can be useful.
Chunking Down Your Stories
Chunking technique convenient method of taking one thing at a time. Better analysis can be done when we work in small portions of our stories this gives a better clarity enough time to understand problematic phases and absorb the learnings from the past experiences to move on rather than feeling overwhelmed in negative experiences thoughts and emotions when you narrate your inner stories you give yourself the freedom of expression introspect on your values and reform your goals.
Outcomes of Narrative Therapy
You respect your journey as a human, undergoing all highs and lows of life. People overcome the habits of self-blame brooding and being judgemental. People challenge their negative beliefs, self talks unhealthy thinking patterns. This gives the 360-degree self-view that opens their mind to healthy practices of living bringing novelty in life.
Conclusion
Narrative therapy is found effective and safe in the process of self-healing, family coaching, and other genres of coaching and counseling. This has also shown great results in better decision making, developing empathy in children and adults, and practicing forgiveness, and developing a better attitude. Slowly people are able to reduce their stress levels focus on what really matters to them and enjoy the essence of healthy relationships.
