Final: NARRATIVE

Question 1

NARRATIVE: Key Concepts

Answer 1

○ People’s lives are created and interpreted through stories

○ Realities are constructed and maintained through language

○ Therapeutic alliance
■ Collaborative
■ Clients are experts on themselves, where as clinician is expert on narrative therapy
p. 236
■ Respectful and encouraging
■ Participatory witness
■ Therapeutic anthropologists
● Not seeking to fix people, rather to learn and understand them, provide different perspectives
● In the family of constructivist theories (emerging approaches) p. 234
● White & Epston - main contributors
● Dominant story -shapes who they are p. 235

○ Counselor skills
■ Encourage, facilitate
■ Inquiring rather than knowing
■ Ask questions about the content and context of stories
■ Resurrection of the suppressed voice

Question 2

NARRATIVE: Interventions

Answer 2

○ Working with life stories, pay attention to
■ Dominant themes
■ Specifications of personhood (info in stories that act as restraints)
■ Lost, untold, marginalized stories
■ Use of language
■ Rigid, constricting narratives
■ Sparkling moment-​ -part of narrative that is very positive and hopeful

○ Questions, lots of questions

○ Eliciting stories

○ Deconstruction or loosening constructs p. 233
■ Mapping
■ Externalizing

○ Search for Unique Outcomes

○ Alternative stories, reauthoring (Revisioning and reauthoring) -p. 238

○ Therapeutic documents
■ Literary documents that articulate client’s problems, contradict dominant plots, etc.
■ Reinforce/provide evidence of accomplishments

Question 3

NARRATIVE: Goals

Answer 3

○ Create a sense of space between a person and their issue
○ Rewrite a person’s story in a more acceptable manner
○ Encourage a wider perspective
○ Deconstruction Goal -being to identify prominent themes & metaphors in stories & id
influence - Help clients see they did not totally create their stories themselves p. 237

Question 4

NARRATIVE: Key Terms

Answer 4

○ Landscapes of consciousness
■ Values/feelings/beliefs that recur in a person’s story

○ Landscapes of Action
■ Sequences of behaviors related to events in a person’s life that pervade and recur in
their stories

○ Specifications of personhood
■ Information in stories telling people how to behave as individuals/family members.
■ Keep people stuck in and limited by their dominant stories.