Narrative Therapy: Externalization and reauthoring lives and relationships

Narrative Therapy

Ultimate truth stories

Internalization

Externalization

Trilling's Lament "How come it that we start out Originals and end up Copies?"

Gertz (1986) "It is the copying that originates."

We have little choice but to start out copies. Then we engage in the process of origination.

Key: What difference would it make if a person who had been situated in an oppressive 'story' - being told - found herself either to be entitled to her own 'story-telling rights' or to have them restored and be enabled to tell her own life and become her own author?

In-determinant Nature of Stories

Lives are shaped through the storying of experience

Good stories are more transformative of the reader's experience than poor stories.

This element of indeterminacy that evolks the text to 'communicate' with the reader...

Perfromance As shaping

Experience structures expression

Life is the performance of text

A sense of lived time.

The units of time are the building blocks from which we construct stories as they have a beginning and end.

Thus it is the story in which we situate our experience that determines the meaning we give the experience.

Critical Thought encourages us to review our assumptions.

Bubenzer, D. L., West, J. D., & Boughner, S. R. (1995). The narrative perspective in therapy. In M. White (Ed.), Re-Authoring Lives: Interviews & Essays (pp. 11-40). Vancouver, BC: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Epson, D., White, M. & Murray, K. (1992). A proposal for re-authoring therapy: Rose's revisioning of her life and a commentary. In S. McNamee & K. J. Gergen (Eds.), Therapy as social construction (pp.96-115). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

White, M. (1995). Re-authoring lives: Interviews & Essays. 199-213. Vancouver, BC: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Social scientists, including Kenneth Gergen, proposed that the 'narrative' or 'story' provides the dominant frame for live experience and for patterning of lived experience.

What we know of the world we only know through our own experience

What processes are involved in our interpretation of it?

Tools and Techniques of Narrative Therapy

1. Try to gain an appreciation of what persons have been going through. You want people to know you understand them to gain confidence and gather information and establish new possibilities.

2. Explore experiences of the problem has the effect of externalizing conversation. Create a different atmosphere around the problem so the problem is experienced as acting upon the person from the outside and not intrinsic to the person.

3. Map the effects of the problem. The more entrenched the problem, the more you need to map it.

Michael White

"When a person comes to counseling, I assume their ways of being and thinking, or ways of being and thinking of others, are somehow problematic for them."

Narrative Therapy is Not Solution-Oriented:

because it is not

1. goal-oriented,

and it is

2. vitally interested in history.

Criteria of Successful Therapy

1. What is a person's preferred ways of living and interacting with themselves and each other.

2. Providing a context that contributes to exploration of other ways of living and thinking.

3. Assisting people to step more into one of the many alternative stories that are judged by them to be preferred - to perform the alternative understandings or meanings that these alternative stories make possible.

Unique Outcomes

A liberation philosophy consistent with second-order cybernetics and postmodern thought

Process of Re-Storying

LANDSCAPES

Form Challenge:

there is no specific sequence of questions in Narrative work.

~ Michael White

landscape of ACTION: constituted by experiences of events that are linked together in sequences through time and according to specific plots.

1. Looking for sub-stories beyond the dominant life story

2. Focus on the aspects of experience that stand outside of dominant stories and sub-stories. These provide a point of entry for re-authoring.

- Such as being curious about linkages or details about events.

3. Then request the person names the counter-plot, gives meaning. This is Important.

landscape of CONSCIOUSNESS = landscape of meaning of that dominant story.

Noted Seminal Therapist

Re-authoring invites people to traffic in both landscapes by reflecting on what they might mean and determine which events most reflect preferred accounts of characteristics, motive, belief and so forth.

Movement must be worked together in both landscapes but is a zig-zagging process that can reach into the future.

Narrative Reach

Michael White

David Epston

at the

Dulwich Centre, Australia

Documentation/homework

1. Letters: Sending clients an account of developments in therapy with them.

2. Expectations document: Can be a document a person uses to re-author their lives and get others to sign-on, commit, invite to join the client in their new definitions.

Metaphors to look for:

1. solidarity

2. alliance

3. collaboration

4. affiliation

Circumstances of consultation and making predictions

Review of Prediction

Therapeutic Documents Checklist

Delivery, Circulation & Safe keeping

1. ID circumstances underwhich document might be consulted.

- Consider pre-established schedule, duress, equation of risk.

2. Speculate about consequences of consulting this document.

- Consider responses to problematic circumstances, relationships,

- Can put these consequences into the document.

- Note: Predictions are not actions

1. Review events between sessions to identify circumstances which warranted consultation of the therapeutic documents.

2. Verify predictions, reflect on significance & accuracy.

- Usual Outcome: people acknowledge extent to which they have become "authorities" in own lives.

- Might discuss meaning of ability to influence shape of their lives and explore possible future steps.

3. If review of events contradicts predictions, therapist can investigate for missing vital pieces of information from document.

1. Introduce the idea of a therapeutic document.

- Discuss how this might be appropriate

- Give other positive examples

2. Therapist shares thoughts on what might be included but does not impose ideas.

- Document is not essential to this work.

- Ask "Would you be interested in receiving such a document?"

3. Proceed with type of form if positive.

- Form could be: letter, charter, statement of position, letter of reference, document of identity.

4. After form is agreed upon, discuss process: collaboration or non-collaboration, therapist uses notes?

1. Delivery: Is document to be mailed, picked up after the session?

-consider confidentiality, living arrangements

2. How readily available will the document be for the client?

- consider living arrangements again.

3. Who may/should read this document?

- Consider the audience, recruiting an audience, authentic reaction of the audience

4. How Many Copies are to me made?

These stories determine the selection of the aspects of experience to be expressed.

Notion of Authenticity

These stories determine real effects and directions in our lives and in our relationships.

These stories give the shape of that expression that we give to those aspects of experience.

Stress: The freedom of the client to construct his or her own life.

A person arrives at a sense of authenticity in life through the performance of texts

Is Narrative Therapy An Approach?

1. Michael White says: No, it is more of a philosophy, epistemology, a personal commitment, a politics, and ethics, a practice, a life, and so on.

2. Training: Go to the Dulwich Centre in Australia OR consider an agency of social justice in the US.

Reauthoring:

1. enables people to separate their lives and relationships from knowledges/stories that are impoverishing;

2. assisting them to challenge practices of self and relationship that are subjugating;

3. encouraging persons to re-author their lives according to alternative knowledges/stories and practices of self and relationship that have preferred outcomes.

"The theme that underlies all Foucault's work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter. What authorities claim as 'scientific knowledge' are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the eighteenth century 'madness' was used to categorize and stigmatise not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and, indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome."

Philip Stokes, Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers,

Social Justice

The constructionist perspective is the system by which you evaluate the relative worth of stories within the underlying value system.

Constructionist positions lead to a state of moral relativism = no basis for making decisions about different actions.

We work hard to resolve or make sense of contradictions and ambiguities which can leave us confused.

In this process, we elevate or invoke some substory of our life creating a multi-storied nature of life.

Mistake: the narrative metaphore = a form of representationalism.

BUT it is the constructionist orientation that accompanies the narrative metaphor.