Narrative Therapy Flashcards
What clients would you use Narrative Therapy with?
- Children with fears, phobias, losses and beh problems
- Adults incapable of tolerating trauma therapies such as early onset, severe, and prolonged abuse and neglect (PTSD)
- Adults or adolescents with DID (Narrative Therapy for communication between alters and therapists)
- Couples and families presenting with severe communication and conflict problems
What is your role as the therapist in narrative therapy?
Develop and probe for and help build internal and external networks of evidence for or against various conclusions. ( challenge peoples world views, self-perceptions and interpretations of events they have experienced)
Define Externalizing problems?
Some people think that they are the problems. Therefore you must externalize the symptoms and speak to the problems as if they are a third party .
How do you fine and expand on exceptions, unique outcomes and problem solving skills of the client?
Another approach is to question the clients for exceptions to otherwise broad and frequent negative patterns of thought of behaviour. These exceptions provide the starting points for re-authoring conversations and eventually into alternative story lines.
How do you use outside witnesses?
Another way to help clients challenge their own negative self-perceptions and interpretations of events is to bring in other people testify to positive exceptions and to listen to and watch the clients as they relay their experiences and comment on those recollections in positive, affirming ways.
How do you build scaffolds through questions and reflections?
Rather than imposing agendas or delivering interventions the narrative therapist is influential through asking questions and providing reflections that help the clients
a) more richly describe alternative stories in their lives
b) step into and explore neglected territories in their lives
c) become more acquainted with the knowledge and skill bases of their lives that are relevant for addressing current concerns, predicaments or problems.
What is the process of inquiry?
Once the problem is identified, then the effects or influences of the problem are mapped. First they are decribed in terms of context, then in terms of relationships affected, conceptual aspects of life affected (purposes, hopes, dreams, values) and movement or lack of it towards the future.
the purpose of these conversations are to make it possible for people to describe alternate stories of their lives and explore neglected territories of their lives and become acquainted with their own knowledge and skills relevant to addressing current problems.
What is re-authorizing conversations?
People are assisted to identify the more unique outcomes (exceptions) or neglected events of their lives and extend them into alternate story lines. Clients are encouraged to step near futures of landscapes of actions in their lives. New proposals of actions are generated and predictions about the outcomes of those proposals.
What is re-membering conversations?
The therapist inquires regarding significant figures in the clients life. The client is encouraged to observe, value and comment on his own identity from the perspective of the significant figure.
What is definitional ceremony and outsider witness responses?
Clients are provided with the option of telling or performing the stories of their lives before audiences of (outsider witnesses). Then the witnesses retell the stories. Then the client describes what stood out from the retelling. Can also be done with letters.
What are the 4 guiding questions in retelling?
- What did you hear or see of significance? Which expressions caught your attention or imagination (SEEING)
- What did that tell you about yourself or the person telling? What purposes, beliefs, hopes, dreams and commitments? (VALUING)
- What did you relate powerfully to? What in your own life accounts for these resonances (RESONATING)
- Where did that take you that is different from where you wre? How have you been moved or become other than you were? (TRANSPORTING)
What is the goal of using witnesses?
Is to move people to places of identity or and lanscapes of the mind that are new and different from those previously occupied as a result of participation.
What is trauma reflections and intentional states held precious?
Ongoing psychological pain is a testimony to the significance of what it was that the person held precious that was violated through the experience of trauma.
This can include?
It is similar to Shattered Assumptions in Person Centered Therapy.
- Cherished purposes for ones life, or moral vision of how the world might be.
- Treasured aspirations, hopes, dreams promises and commitments
- Prized values and beliefs around acceptance, justice and fairness.
What does a narrative therapist attempt to do?
By reflecting on the trauma, and on the changes of self-perceptions as a result of the trauma (more fragile, vulnerable, confused, powerless) a more robust sense of self (more self honouring, more aware of options, and grater sense of how to proceed in life)
