Add another edition? Includes bibliographical references p. Copy and paste this code into your Wikipedia page. Need help? Narrative means to therapeutic ends Michael White.
Donate this book to the Internet Archive library. If you own this book, you can mail it to our address below. Borrow Listen. Want to Read. Delete Note Save Note. In situations like these, there are always important, vital strands of lived experience that challenge the dominant narrative, and that need to be woven into the account if the problem is to be truly solved.
It can be very difficult, if not impossible, to weave these vital strands into the narrative when a person, or generally multiple people are telling a story where the problem is inherent to a particular person or relationship. This leads to the problem no longer being experienced as inherent to a person or relationship; the problem is no longer experienced as a fixed quality of a given person or relationship.
Is this the right way to deal with every problem? Of course not, but it can be a powerful way to render certain problems less fixed and restricting, and can lead to genuine resolutions. Think about how the dynamics of problems tend to play out in a family. Although any given problem might come to be seen as internal to one particular person, all the family members are affected in some way, and might often feel overwhelmed, hopeless, and defeated.
In different ways, they can all begin to take the ongoing existence of the problem, and their failed attempts to solve it, as revelations of fixed structural aspects of themselves, each other, and their relationships.
Over time this leads to a problem-saturated description of individual and family life, which all too often becomes the dominant story in any given family. Like salt in boiling water, the problem is dissolved and invisible in the hot, agitated solution of a disturbed individual or family. In other words, externalizing problems can: -Decrease unproductive conflict between people, especially arguments over who is to blame for the problem -Loosen the suffocating sense of failure that has developed for people in response to the continued existence of the problem, despite their best efforts to solve it -Pave the way for people to cooperate with each other, to unite in the struggle against the problem, and to sever its influence over their lives and relationships.
From this new perspective, people can begin to more clearly see the meaning of those previously ignored vital strands of experience in their lives and relationships that were clouded by the problem-saturated account; this meaning provides the threads out of which new stories are stitched together. This process, when carefully and competently stewarded, can lead to the genuine resolution of problems.
One way to guide the adventure of weaving a new story is to try to develop a consciously conversational approach to individual and family life that encourages the active process of telling alternative stories. Over time this renders more complex and intricate patterns out of the thread of meaning. All this draws out new textures and meanings from people and relationships that were previously flat and dull. So, as an individual or a family member, how do you use writing to begin to externalize a problem?
Before that, how can you use writing to simply begin to define a problem? Writing can help you do this. Extraction can help you dissect and examine a problem from different angles than you might be used to seeing it from.
Hopefully this can help you and other people put the problem in a pen and starve it to death! The first step of extracting a problem is to define it. You want to define the problem with as much precision as possible across its entire range of manifestation, so that you give yourself and others the best chance of actually solving the problem and preventing it, or one similar to it, from emerging and becoming embedded in you or someone else again.
So, to start with, try to define and map the influence of the problem in your own life and in your relationships.
A helpful way to begin this is to consider how you would name the problem, and then how you would categorize it. As far as categorizing the problem, is it: -Physical? Answering the following kinds of questions can help you name, categorize, and map the footprint of the problem in your life and relationships. It can be a struggle to name and define a problem in ways that adequately represent your experience, but try to be as specific as you can every step of the way.
In addition, this type of investigation and exploration can help you begin to identify the impact the problem is having on other people. Try to think of all the people the problem is affecting, starting with those you think are most intensely affected. Try to identify at least 5—10 people if you can.
It can be good to start with people who you think might really want to help solve the problem in ways that work for as many other people as possible. This also helps remind everyone involved of the continuing need for flexibility and negotiation. Initially prioritizing this kind of collaboration can also make it possible for everyone involved to begin the experience by participating in a coordinated blossoming of individual and interpersonal trust and agency; a kind of social initiation.
This is really important and worth attempting, because a broad and deep definition of the problem and an atmosphere of trust are going to help you and the other people impacted by the problem to identify as many of those neglected but vital strands of lived experience as possible.
More people can gather more threads of meaning to stitch and weave a new story out of; a story strong enough to challenge the dominant narrative within which the problem is being experienced. The image of a neuron is a great organic form to inspire connective creativity.
Yet a mutually acceptable definition is critical for any serious attempt at solving a problem involving multiple people. Collaborative mind mapping can be a very effective way to generate a consensus on everything from a definition of the problem to the threads of neglected meaning that are going to be used to weave the pattern of the new story. Remember, the problem is probably not just impacting you as an individual.
More narrative therapy exercises can be found at that Medium account if anyone reading this is interested. Feb 12, akemi rated it liked it Shelves: pure-ideology , trauma-recovery. Essentially, a social impasse, rather than arising due to a pathological person, arises out of an alienated totality of all persons involved. To be overwhelmed, at one's limit, to feel like a failure, or to feel incapable of getting through to someone, reveals a dearth in one's dominant narrative to express or enact one's lived experience or understand an other's lived experience.
One becomes an impotent object in the face of seemingly alien forces. One loses one's sense of agency because th Essentially, a social impasse, rather than arising due to a pathological person, arises out of an alienated totality of all persons involved. One loses one's sense of agency because the dominant narrative one operates under is incapable of bypassing whatever problematic has arisen.
Narrative Therapy posits that persons are not failures, but rather that dominant narratives fail us, for we are more than our narratives, even if we can only operate through narratives. The symbolic is necessary, even if it is a misrecognition and limitation of the real.
Narrative Therapy attempts to rupture problematic dominant narratives, through the recovery of marginalised, exceptional and irregular experiences that cannot be fitted into the dominant narrative.
The particularity of marginalised knowledges is brought forth to challenge the universality of dominant knowledges. It's pretty basic hegemony stuff, and the authors bring in Foucault's panopticon without providing a convincing argument as to how reauthoring one's own discourse bears any weight upon the material techniques of power that are reproduced in discourses of pedagogy, economy, media, politics, and so on and so on.
Like it's great if you learn to treat your child as a qualitative, subjective being with their own desires, but good luck enacting that discourse in a workplace that monitors your affective performance with big happy face rating systems and gps phone apps tracking your efficiency across time. There is simply not enough discussion over the actual, material technologies of power that run in concert with techniques of power, which while we do enact ourselves, we do not always enact out our own of desire.
Furthermore, the problematic discourses we have inherited cannot so easily be disinherited when they are reproduced all around us. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Narrative means to therapeutic ends Item Preview.
EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. Norton , - Medical - pages. White and Epston base their therapy on the assumption that people experience problems when the stories of their lives, as they or others have invented them, do not sufficiently represent their lived experience. Therapy then becomes a process of storying or restorying the lives and experiences of these people. In this way narrative comes to play a central role in therapy.
Both authors share delightful examples of a storied therapy that privileges a person's lived experience, inviting a reflexive posture and encouraging a sense of authorship and reauthorship of one's experiences and relationships in the telling and retelling of one's story.
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