Narrative therapy views problems as arising from the stories people tell about their world and aims to help clients develop alternative stories. The therapist acts as a detective to understand the client's experiences and helps the client become the author of their own life by asking questions, exploring exceptions to problems, and facilitating the discovery of new meanings and perspectives through conversation. The goal is not to fix problems but to create shifts in the client's stories that empower them and bring new competence and resolution to difficulties.

1. Narrative Therapy
Relationship-based
Practice

2. Premise
People make sense of their world through
language and stories
Can be brief
View people as competent

3. How Problems are Seen
• Problems arise because of subscriptions to
narrow and self defeating views of world
• People are not problems; the problem is the
problem
• Problems are to be deconstructed and
externalized

4. New Insights Through Stories
• Drawing people’s attention to subtle changes
in their lives can foster new insights, promote
empowerment, and help people develop
better ways to resolve difficulties
• People become authors of their own lives
• Clients are experts on their lives.
• Externalization allows re-authoring (hidden
problems can’t be changed)

5. Emphasis in Therapy
• Listening, accepting, making non-judgmental,
non-confrontational comments
• Can ask multiple forms of same question
(intricate and delicate process)
• Therapist as linguistic detective
• Not seeking to heal or fix, but to learn about
client and understand them

6. Goals
• Therapists invite clients to describe their
experience in new language; facilitate process
of discovery
• Create shift to bring about new meaning to
client’s story

7. Therapist Role
• Suggest alternative viewpoints
• Mirroring
• Emphasis on being encouraging of client
strengths and resources
• Participatory, interactive
• Careful listening, empathic, summarization,
paraphrasing to give people ownership

8. Therapist Role continued
• Search for exceptions to the problem
• Ask clients to speculate about what kind of
future they could expect from new feelings of
competence
• Separate person from problem

9. Techniques
• Questions!! More questions!!
• Creating alternative stories, identifying
preferred directions
• Externalizing – when has client been
successful, new (less problem-saturated)
stories around problems

10. Techniques continue
• Raise Dilemmas
• Predict setbacks
• Celebrations, certificates

11. Limitations
• No set formulas
• Attitude is critical
• Therapist needs to be able to make quick
assessments, assist clients in setting up goals
and effectively use appropriate interventions