What Is Narrative Therapy?

In many ways, narrative therapy is a repackaging of conceptualizations and approaches found in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT). Just as in CBT, narrative therapy assumes that psychological dysfunction is caused primarily by the way a person thinks about his or her circumstances. Where CBT calls the foundational ideas about self and the world core beliefs, narrative therapy calls them dominant narratives.

When a person develops sufficiently powerful narratives about himself or the world, information that contradicts such narratives gets ignored while information that supports them acquires additional weight. If those narratives are negative enough, they can lead to psychological distress.

Many interventions used in narrative therapy are similar to those found in CBT or SFBT. The primary ones among them are externalization and the search for unique outcomes. The former seeks to assist the client in disassociating herself from her problem, allowing her to see that the problem is not all-encompassing but rather belongs to a specific narrative she has adopted. The latter encourages the client to analyze the times in her life that were free of the problem and identify what alternative narratives she was living at those times.

However, unlike CBT and SFBT, narrative therapy seeks not only to explain and improve our relationship with the world and self but also puts forward a couple philosophical postulates. First, narrative therapy all but denies the existence of objective reality; as far as people are concerned, reality is deemed constructed through social conditioning. Second, narrative therapy puts a lot of stock in the language people use to describe their circumstances; the belief is that our words shape the narratives and, by extension, reality we live in.

Put simply, narrative therapists believe that the human mind not only interprets reality but also constructs it. At first glance, the difference between interpreting and constructing may appear superficial. However, it can lead to very different therapeutic strategies.

While CBT endeavors to rid the client of his maladaptive core beliefs or, at least, replace them with more attenuated versions, the goal for the client is to develop a more balanced, nuanced, and realistic worldview. By contrast, in narrative therapy, the goal is for the client to replace a negative narrative with a more positive one, even if the latter is no closer to reality than the former. Since narrative psychology considers it impossible for people to grasp reality completely objectively (which is true), the suggestion is for the client to stop trying and simply construct a narrative that removes psychological discomfort and allows him to move on with his life in a happier manner (which is debatable).

Narrative therapy is more than a therapeutic modality. It is a practical application of the postmodernist idea of constructivism to the sphere of talk therapy. While borrowing heavily from both CBT and SFBT, its treatment philosophy of “whatever works” is more closely aligned with the latter. Narrative therapy approaches people not as semi-rational agents with certain innate qualities that constitute their personhood, but as collections of internalized narratives to be deliberately adjusted.

In The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character has his memory repeatedly erased by the military. Each time, he is told he’s nothing but an obedient soldier. However, a letter he writes to himself allows him to reconstruct his identity after such erasures. Narrative therapists would say that Vonnegut’s character is little more than a narrative about himself, and the only question is whether it is a malevolent narrative concocted by the military or a more edifying one he has written down himself.

There is also, of course, another way of looking at Vonnegut’s protagonist. What if he is not a mere narrative, written and rewritten by the vicissitudes of life, but an ingenious person whose intelligence, creativity, rebelliousness, and a slew of other objective characteristics have compelled him first to write himself that letter and then, upon its discovery, to accept and embrace what it had to say? This alternative reading rings truer to me.