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What is written with a pen, you cannot take it out with an ax. The creators of the narrative approach, Michael White and David Epston, do not argue with the Russian proverb. Considering the lives of people and their relationships as these stories, today already world-famous and respected Australian experts, they say: “Ue” is not necessary.
It is enough to take a closer look at what is written — to read from a different angle, to look at what is written in small print, in brackets, footnotes, comments, in those fragments of our personal history that we at one time preferred not to include in the main storylines, but which, not less, they have not gone anywhere, one has only to remember them and breathe life into them again.
Rewrite your life story
«Narrative» in translation from English means «story», «narrative». Narrative therapy is a conversation in which people “retell”, that is, they tell in a new way, the stories of their lives. For narrative therapists, “story” is some events linked in certain sequences over a certain time period and thus brought into a state of plot endowed with meaning.
When we are born, we have no idea what the meaning of our experience every second has, no names for what we experience. We do not know who we are, where we are, that we are people, relatives are around us, there is a toy over the crib, and we ourselves, for example, are satisfied or hungry. We don’t even have such concepts as “who”, “where”, “around”, “I”, pleasure, etc. Gradually, from the people around us, we learn that we are, we have a name, we are a boy or a girl, that we are naughty or behave well, that we are pushy or lazy, whiny or sensitive, smart or naughty. Adults tell us that now we are sad, and at another moment we are glad that we are hurt or funny, anxious or calm. So step by step we form stories about who we are and what our life is like. And life goes on, and to every moment we experience, we attribute one or another meaning in accordance with the knowledge we already have. The life story of every person consists of many intertwining stories — about what he is, about his personal life, career, studies, his achievements and disappointments, family and hobbies, desires and plans. At the same time, we strive to ensure that each storyline looks logical, and all of them are somehow coordinated with each other. So, for example, if a person has a story that he is an altruist, a philanthropist, and also a law-abiding citizen, it will be difficult for him to combine with it the story that he chose a career as a killer and achieved great success in it. And a person who learns early that he is a smart and diligent boy, and that this is very good, and then, in accordance with this knowledge, adding something new to him, that he is a talented student and a purposeful young man, it will be easy to explain to himself how he turned out to be in a cap and gown at the graduation ceremony at Harvard. The subtlety is that in the life of a philanthropist, for sure, there was a moment when he stood in a subway car during rush hour, squeezed by unfamiliar bodies and hated all of humanity, and a Harvard graduate more than once failed to cope with tasks and felt a desire to quit everything and grow flowers, it’s just that our heroes did not write these events in the history of their lives, making them seem to be invisible, for a while, and maybe forever.
One of Michael White’s basic ideas is that, in reality, a person’s life consists of a huge number of events, too contradictory to be able to compose a more or less coherent plot from them. Therefore, we mainly pay attention to those events that confirm the dominant stories we have already constructed about us, and we discard and quickly forget numerous episodes that contradict these dominant storylines, seeing in them inexplicable «accidents». So, for example, a girl who has already developed a dominant story that she is shy and withdrawn will remember how she really wanted to participate in the school play, but was afraid to volunteer, and will add this episode to her already existing story. It is surprising at the same time that the girl did not dare to volunteer just under the influence of ideas about herself as closed and shy. In the summer of the same year, this girl, while relaxing in the country, herself met and became friends with an already established group of guys; a few months before the theater episode, she applied for a television competition; and, finally, she was embarrassed to say about her desire to play in the play, but she had this desire (!), And this is not very typical for closed people. All these episodes will remain, as it were, no lot, they have no place in her main story about herself, they contradict this story and therefore for the girl — the author of the story they look like separate ones, as if “hanging in the void”, not endowed with special meaning and therefore quickly fading lines.
Suppose this girl has grown up, her story about isolation has already become very dense. She comes to a narrative therapist and says that she is unable to take the initiative or even respond to the advances of young people, avoids taking part in corporate parties, she has little experience in communication, and worries about this lack of experience prevent her from finally entering into communication, into As a result, she is dissatisfied with her success, both in work and in her personal life, and does not know how to change this. This young woman will tell the therapist that she has been withdrawn and shy since childhood, and will cite episodes already familiar to us and as many more like them to confirm her words. The therapist, by asking special questions, will help our heroine to recall in detail, give new meaning and combine into a new story numerous episodes from her life that do not fit into that problematic story, narrative therapists call a story that a person at the moment considers to be useless for himself problematic — rich, with which she came.
In order to replace the problem-rich story “I am withdrawn, shy, I don’t know how to communicate”, in collaboration with a therapist, a woman could create an alternative story that she, let’s say, wants to call “I am interesting to other people, and they are interesting to me”, she does not you need to “change” in the truest sense of the word, somehow painfully transforming your “I”. As we have seen in her life, in reality, there are already many stories and countless events in the potential, and she is free to choose which events to select and what meaning to give them in order to “construct herself” in her own preferred way.
In fact, our lives are multi-historical. Each moment contains space for the existence of many stories, and the same events, depending on the meanings attributed to them and the nature of the connections, can develop into different plots. Any story is not devoid of some degree of uncertainty and inconsistency. And no story can contain all life circumstances.
Society
Of course, not only members of our family have the knowledge of what meaning to attribute to the experience we receive, this knowledge is shared by the entire community in which we were born, our society. Michael White is very fond of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and used many of his ideas to create his method. Michel Foucault drew attention to the fact that in different societies, at different times, ideas about what is “normal”, what corresponds to “common sense” or “it goes without saying” vary greatly.
Narrative therapists believe that the basic, «generally accepted» ideas that people usually take for the «laws of life», «orders of things» and «eternal truths» about what a person and society are, in fact change over the course of history. In each specific society, at each specific moment in the period of history, there are people and social institutions (science, church, council of elders) that determine what kind of knowledge should be considered true — including the knowledge that there is a mental pathology, a mental norm and not a norm. , crime, disease, sexuality, etc. Although this knowledge looks like an immutable, «eternal» truth, in fact, once they did not exist, then people agreed among themselves that, for example, the Earth is flat. The children of these people still remember that «the fathers decided so», and after a few generations everyone already simply knows that «this is so.» And the one who thinks that «not so» is a madman or a fool. So, in every society there is some kind of dominant knowledge. The fact that a normal person strives for happiness, or that happiness can only await us in the afterlife; that a beautiful woman has seven folds on her stomach, or that she should not have a stomach at all; that a decent person should work, or that a respectable person is one who just can afford not to work; that children are of great value and great joy, or that they have no soul and can be thrown off a cliff; that loneliness is a boon that promotes spiritual development and opens the way to happiness, or a sign of inferiority and an indispensable condition for unhappiness; that a psychotherapist, a confessor, friends, alcohol or a party committee can help a person cope with problems.
White, following Foucault, believes that we tend to take on faith and even kind of merge with the dominant histories of our culture, easily agreeing that they contain the truth about who we are, how we understand our experience, and how we should be. And this dominant knowledge hides the possibilities that other, alternative histories could offer. According to Michael White, people come into therapy when the dominant stories prevent them from living their own preferred stories, or when the person is actively involved in the fulfillment of stories they find useless. A woman undergoing one plastic surgery after another is influenced by several popular stories in our modern society.
That a person should be happy, that “women’s happiness, would be nice next to you”, that in order to achieve this happiness you need to have a certain body, and what this body should be is explained in detail in the media. A wrinkle of fat for this woman begins to mean that she is «abnormal», sad experiences about this only exacerbate this feeling, because the «norm» for a person to be happy, and the lack of an ideal family life finally convinces that she is a completely wrong person and normal people should just shy away from it. A woman feels bad, which means that the story about the need to achieve happiness through a perfect body is not useful to her.
If she comes to a narrative therapist, he will try to make the social knowledge and stereotypes that support her problem story visible by talking to her. Then she will be able to discuss their influence on herself, take a more active position towards them, decide how useful they are for her, and, perhaps, turn to some other alternative knowledge that is not currently dominant in her culture. A fold of fat can mean anything, for example: “I can take good care of myself”, “I can afford and know how to enjoy”, “I am confident in myself”, “I am ready for motherhood”, “a fold of fat”.
Thus, in the course of a narrative conversation, the repertoire of knowledge attracted by a person to interpret his experience changes, and, consequently, experience and history change.
We are not problems. Problems are problems.
Narrative therapists believe that how we think is largely determined by the language we speak. When a person hears “you are inattentive”, or says to himself “I am selfish”, it looks as if the problem “Inattention” or “Egoism” is an integral part of him, he is like that, which means he is “problematic”, with him something is wrong. In this case, a visit to a therapist becomes a grandiose enterprise for a person to change himself. Deciding on this is not easy, by definition it must last long and painfully, and may require very serious efforts. Talking to a person as if something is wrong with him, even during therapy, we only increase his sense of his own «problem».
Michael White and David Epston believe that if you talk about problems a little differently, then they are much easier to deal with. Narrative therapists distinguish a person from his problems, they do not talk to a problem person, but talk to a person about his problem. The problem is the problem, not the person. During the narrative conversation we talk about Alcoholism, Depression, Fear of control, Perfectionism, Laziness, Restlessness, Fear of loneliness, etc., the person explores how the problem affects his life, how it convinces him to act in one way or another, what is his experience and methods of confronting the problem, how his plans and dreams differ from the Problem’s plans for his life. The technique of separating a person from his problem is called externalization. It is especially useful in working with families, as it allows everyone to work together to deal with a separate problem, rather than unite against a «problem» family member.
It is very easy to separate problems from themselves and children part with them even more easily. As soon as the child discovers that he and the Problem have different plans for life, or that she is lying, he easily tells the problem to “get out”, and she leaves. It could be Len, dreaming that he would remain illiterate and without friends, with an old computer and always dissatisfied parents. Laziness, which whispers to him that he is not smart enough to cope with homework, and there are so many interesting things around that can be distracted. But the boy himself dreams of becoming a programmer, he likes to communicate and needs a new computer. He has successfully completed tasks more than once, and he knows that he can be smart, diligent, enjoy achievements, and he is actually interested in many things. Laziness deceives him, arguing that he will not survive failure, is incapable of effort, and therefore it is better to “run away” right away.
Having learned how the Problem works, parents can help a child who decides to part with such Laziness, if they are more calm about his failures and encourage efforts.
So, during narrative therapy, a person separates his problems from himself, explores them and reconsiders his relationship with them.
Therapist position
Narrative therapists do not consider themselves experts in other people’s lives. Narrative theory lacks the idea of a «norm» and the knowledge of how a person or their relationship should be. The person himself is the author of his story and the expert in his life, only he can decide what is preferable for him. By collaborating with a person, a therapist can help them identify preferences, see opportunities, create a new story about themselves, and bring it to life.
For whom?
Any person or group of people can turn to narrative practices to resolve their difficulties. Difficulties can also be anything.
Narrative methods are widely used with very young children, and the therapist may use toys or drawings. There is a rich experience of narrative assistance to people who are assigned psychiatric diagnoses in our society. The narrative approach is by far the most modern and leading direction in family psychotherapy.
Stages of work
The criterion of effectiveness in narrative practice is the decision of the people themselves that they have achieved their goals. Therefore, at the end of each meeting, the therapist asks if people need the next meeting and when, in their opinion, it would be useful for them to organize it. Sometimes one conversation is enough. More often it can be 3-10 meetings once a week for 1-2 hours each. Sometimes people find it helpful to come once a month or less, sometimes several times a week. In narrative work, meaningful changes need to start fairly quickly, while some people take time to decide on preferences by testing them in everyday life, or to sufficiently develop and “revive” a new preferred story, then there may be more meetings. There are people who want to solve several problems or do self-exploration, this can also be devoted to more time. The cost of one meeting ranges from 50 to 100 USD, social discounts are usually possible.