Narrative Therapy: What's Your Story?

In preparation for the upcoming Parenting Class, I've been reading about Narrative Therapy and find the concepts stimulating. One interesting notion is that "an alternative to traditional therapeutic certainty is curiosity." To elucidate, in traditional therapy the client is diagnosed as having a certain problem (depressed, anxious, dependent, etc.), and the therapist is the expert who 'knows' rather than being curious about the client. The problem belongs to the client, rather the client having a problem outside their identity.

These concepts have some parallels to authoritarian versus authoritative parenting. For instance, an authoritarian parent would take the more shaming view of the child as the problem--"She is an angry child who must be controlled!" while the authoritative parent would externalize the problem by saying--"There is this anger that she's dealing with. Let's find out how she sees that impacting her."

I've done the authoritarian or certainty route as a parent, thinking I understood this or that behavior (and of course I would with a Masters in Mental Health Counseling). The notion of simply being curious about my child is outside the purview of the mind. Who is this person anyway? What is their life like at home, school, work, with their friends and in my case, with their significant other?

Narrative Therapy holds that our identity, who we see ourselves to be, is shaped by our stories, both personal and societal. When our stories are full of problems, this negatively impacts our identity. Sometimes, the answers to these problems are in the alternative, 'on the fringe of our lives' stories we don't think to tell. We don't tell these alternative stories because we put front and central in our view, stories that are bereft with problems. We rely on dualities such as healthy/unhealthy; normal/abnormal; and functional/dysfunctional. We rely on the stories given to us by our culture, rather than telling the complex, multifaceted narrative of our lives. In a sense, when we tell the 'fringe' stories, we are thinking outside the box.

The motto: “The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem” is central to Narrative Therapy. With this foundation, there is not only more curiosity for the therapist, but less shame for the client, and the therapist shifts the client's focus away from self-attack, looking at the problem as separate from the person and seeing how that problem influences the client.

Could we do the same with our children? When there is a problem, we could externalize it and shift our thinking away from any shame or recrimination and simply deal with the problem, with curiosity as our foundation.

I think that would require us, as parents, to not blame ourselves for what we think we are seeing, to not rely on traditional interpretation, to not project our upset onto the child. A lot of (k)NOTS! So what would be required, besides what to not do? Self-love, understanding the chatter between our ears and applying veracity--in essence our own growth is required. Add to that curiosity and the story unfolds!