Narrative therapy

I use a narrative approach to counselling and therapy. My understanding is that: 

• We live by the stories we have about our lives. They are our main psychological tools, and shape how we think and behave, and how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

• Stories filter and focus our understandings, the meanings we make of things and our feelings. Sometimes they can blind us to ways of feeling, thinking and behaving that don’t fit their interpretation of our lives.

• We all have some key stories about ourselves that we hang onto quite tightly. 

• Our stories about ourselves have been developed jointly by ourselves and the important people who have influenced our lives, and by the wider community. 

• It is difficult when our experience does not fit easily into the stories that have been most important to us.

• Our stories are always based on SELECTED events—they are never complete.

• We don’t have to passively accept the stories we have lived with, or which are imposed upon us.

• In our past and in our present lives (and in the futures we shape for ourselves) there is always material for new stories that we have not yet told ourselves or other people.

• It is my job to help you look at your life in ways that help you “author” new stories and  “re-author” old ones.

• This can have remarkably healing effects.

In these ideas I am particularly influenced by Michael White, David Epston and Johnella Bird. A good straightforward beginners book is Alice Morgan, What is narrative therapy? An easy-to read introduction, Dulwich Centre Publications, Adelaide, 2000.

Two websites which include a great deal of material on Narrative Therapy, and links to many other sites concerned with the narrative approach is are the Narrativeapproaches.com site and the Narrative Psychology Internet and Resource Guide 

A slightly different strand of thought about psychology, which contributes to my work, is represented by the Russian Marxist psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who focuses on the interacting development of language, consciousness, behaviour and social organisation. He emphasises the importance of words as psychic tools more than stories. You can follow Vygotsky up through the Lev Vygotsky archive

You can see an application for narrative therapy to Coming Out as a gay person here.

 © Bill Logan 2001, 2004