narrative therapy 101
I know that this is a ridiculous amount of blogging, but there’s nothing else I would rather be doing right now.
Considering a lot of us are spending a lot more time storytelling about ourselves through blogs and flickr, I think that we should be aware of the basics of narrative therapy. It seems pretty relevant to a lot of the discussions we have. (Context: I’ve done a fair amount of reading about psychology and therapy over the last 6 years. As well as a little reading about ideas of narrative).
All of us need to select from the huge amount of information the world throws at us all the time. We need to organise what we see, hear, feel and remember into a meaningful ‘story’ or ‘picture’. This always introduces biases: we notice and remember things we find interesting, important, and in line with our beliefs, expectations and prejudices. We ignore, forget or play down things that are contrary to the way we see the world. So, things we notice and remember tend to confirm and strengthen our story about ourselves and our world.
This is fine for most people, because they live reasonably happily within their world. Problems arise when a person is stuck in a story that makes him/her, or others, unhappy. Examples are stories involving beliefs like:
* “I am a violent person, have a short fuse (and can’t help it)”.
* “I am no good, useless, have no worth, no-one could possibly love me.”
* “The world is a terribly dangerous place and I am helpless in the face of its threats.”They all involve the belief that “there is something wrong with me”.
Narrative therapy is a search for events which prove these beliefs to be false. There are always exceptions: events that occurred, but didn’t fit the story, so were ignored, played down or forgotten. They can be used to “write a new story”, one that separates the problem from the way the person sees himself/herself. Once the problem is found and named, it can be fought. In the process, the person does not have to change. S/he discovers a past, an identity, that was always there, but hidden by the biases of the previous story. The new story liberates the person from the shackles of the problem.
from here
and:
Narrative therapy is premised on the idea that the lives and the relationships of persons are shaped by:
* the knowledges and stories that communities of persons negotiate and engage in to give meaning to their experiences: and
* certain practices of self and of relationship that make up ways of life associated with these knowledges and stories.A narrative therapy assists persons to resolve problems by:
* enabling them to separate their lives and relationships from those knowledges and stories that they judge to be impoverishing;
* assisting them to challenge the ways of life that they find subjugating; and,
* encouraging persons to re-author their own lives according to alternative and preferred stories of identity, and according to preferred ways of life.
from here
There’s also some good info here.
I’ve spent some time a few months ago wondering about how all of the personal authoring that we’re doing was affecting us. I know that we’ve always managed how we present ourselves (simmel + goffman on impression managment) and been authors of our lives, but there’s a lot more of us doing it a lot more these days. If the idea that narrative therapy is based on is true and a lot of how we live our lives is determined by the storys we tell about ourselves, then how is that affected by blogging, flickring, etc. Is our ability to re-author our stories augmented or decreased? And what about the persistance of these online narratives? Will it be harder for me to re-author my story of my teenage years if I can actually go and read them in my old livejournal?
What I’m wondering is: Is our increasing inability to forget going to hinder our ability for personal growth?
Re-authoring does not only require paying more attention to certain events in our lives that we were previously downplaying. It also requires downplaying events that we were previously focusing on. It requires forgetting - and are we going to be able to forget if we know a record is just a click away?
therefore: the Tyranny of Persistent Online Personas (said with partial tongue-in-cheekness)
And because of that - the DLF. To (forcefully) restore to people their ability to change.
October 24th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
I’m not a specialist but I made (and saw people doing) some psychotherapies. Some of the work looks like what you explain : discover that it’s not that bad, things done in the past are not so terrible, etc.
Revisiting the past, getting out of what we think we are is complex and I don’t know anybody who did it by hiself. Mostly because you tend to think in a closed loop. I tend to think it might be the same with narrative therapy : hard to do when you’re alone. That’s the kind of thing where it’s good to have someone to guide you (someone that ask questions most of the time)
Blog, persistent contents on the Internet (and else where) are as biased as our memory : we put there what we want, we interpret this with the same pespective. My blog only tells what it what to say at that specific moment. One can (must) overcome this as everything else that pollute the way of thinking what you are. It may be harder but not a lot imho. (the most difficult step is to start thinking things _can_ be different)
This make me thinks about a post Karl wrote where he said he would create a script that slowly destroys old posts of his blog.
October 24th, 2005 at 10:20 pm
Des systèmes et des hommes
Raphael, au sujet de notre servitude involontaire, résumait:
Un système de pensée est souvent auto-cohérent : il ne permet de penser que des choses qui restent dans ce même système. Pour sortir du système de pensée propriétaire, il ne s’agi…
November 6th, 2006 at 11:50 am
ionolsen40 So interesting site, thanks! www.wb55.com sad