Narrative Foundations

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Narrative Therapy

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  • Three Building Blocks for a Socially Constructed Identity

This is Narrative Therapy

Foundations:
Multi-Storied, Relational Beings, and There is No Taken for Granted Truth

Narrative therapy is grounded in 'post-modern' approaches to thought and life.

"Modernist" ideas reflect the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries love affair with the scientific method- the pursuit of single truths, explanations, and categories; a reverence for linear, logical progressions, and elegant, unifying theories.

"Post-modernist" ideas recognize multiple voices, multiple perspectives, diverse ways of being; post-modernist approaches value fluidity, relational ways of being, and chaos theories that admit the limitation of our theories, from discovery to discovery. 

Applied to therapeutic conversations, post-modernist perspectives flow from curiosity  and exploration. We see how people respond to each other differently under different circumstances, that roles are shaped by settings and expectations, and that people have multiple identities that they enact.

Further, post-modernist approaches take a tentative stance to 'truth-claims', supposing that a 'truth' today, will likely be altered by new understandings in the future. 'Truths' are taken as 'place-holders'. And, we know that these 'place-holder truths' can have great power in people's lives, to restrict thought and action, or to open up possibilities. For this reason,  we explore and question the sources and effects of 'truths' in people's lives.

And finally, there is a basic assumption is that there are many, many experiences in a person's life that are not told in any coherent way; they are 'unstoried'. Some stories are commonplace, and have more credibility than others. Some stories are mythic, or scripted, and become a kind of blueprint for lives. And other stories are waiting to be co-created, strung together out of events that have happened but have not yet been linked together.

Post-modern therapies consider people to be ‘multi-selved’ and ‘multi-storied’.

There are several observations connected to this:

  • That we behave differently in different contexts
  • That different people ‘read’ us differently
  • That these ‘readings’ influence our sense of identity
  • That some ‘readings’ are more influential than others
  • That these ‘readings’ often turn into ‘tellings’
  • That these ‘tellings’ can shape our identities
  • That these ‘tellings’ do not always represent how we prefer to be understood
  • That there are other ‘tellings’ that could be possible

This is Narrative Therapy.

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