Narrative Reasoning

Question 1

What is it?

Answer 1

There are two main approaches that people use to organize and make sense out of their experiences:

logical thinking and stories or narrative thinking. Both of these approaches have a long history of providing useful structures for organizing experiences and being able to make sense of them.

Narrative reasoning is an inductive cognitive strategy used to understand patients’ experiences with illness
within the biosocial context of their lives

It is the process of understanding patients’ experiences with illness within the biosocial context of their lives including beliefs,
values, and culture.1 The stories that patients tell of their illness experiences include descriptions of their conditions, daily
experiences, perspectives on treatment, and perspectives on recovery.

These stories engage both the patient and the clinician
and are a conduit for the narrative reasoning process. As noted by Coles,
“If our job [is] to help our patients understand what they had experienced by getting them to tell their stories, our job [is] also to
realize that as active listeners, we give shape to what we hear, make over their stories into something of our own