The Effects of Narrative Therapy

This blog is presented by Yamid Montalvo, LPC. For more information, please visit Martin Counseling.

The Effects of Narrative Therapy

Emotional problems can arise at any moment and change people’s lives dramatically. Narrative therapy has been a great tool for counselors to help clients identify a better way to deal with a problem. Michael White and David Epston developed it in the 1980s (Good Therapy, 2015). It served as a therapeutic aide to guide clients through difficult situations. It consisted of externalizing the problem, mapping, and finding outcomes to help the client discover strengths to overcome any problematic situation (White & Epston, 1990). This form of therapy has been used with a wide range of people to improve their emotional well-being. It has been successfully applied with children, but it has been successful with adults as well. This form of therapy has had a great impact on the world of counseling since it is relatively easy to be applied.

Concepts

 According to White and Epson (1990), when an emotional or behavioral problem is presented in someone’s life, it is common to believe that only one person is affected by it. However, problems can impact every member of the client’s family as well. Most of the time, relationships between family members suffer as much as the person with the problem. Therefore, the key aspect of narrative therapy is to externalize the problem. This allows the client and everyone involved to identify the problem and blame the problem itself instead of blaming the person suffering from the problem. This provides a new perspective on dealing with the problem, which can show them healthier ways to undermine it. In order to externalize the problem appropriately, it has to be considered a person; it has to be named and treated as if it were a physical being. In this way, the person affected is not judged, and the focus remains on solving the problem (White & Epston, 1990). For everyone involved to externalize the problem, there should be an agreement on how it affects everyone involved. This part of the process is called the Acceptable Definition of the Problem. This means the family members cannot disagree on how the problem affects each other. Therefore, they all have to define the problem to facilitate finding a solution. The next step is to analyze the relationships between the people affected, and the problem in a process called mapping.

In a study by Kasmaei and Asghari (2017), narrative therapy was used to find how to reduce impulsivity and aggression in children. They had 30 male orphan children between the ages of seven to 11 years old who had been diagnosed with aggressive behavior disorders, lack of interpersonal relationships, and inability to control impulses (Kasmaei & Asghari, 2017). The participants were assigned to narrative and play therapy for ten 90-minute sessions. In each session, the experimental group would be exposed to narrative therapy, and each of the children was assigned to come up with different stories. The results found in this study suggested that narrative therapy, along with play therapy, had a significant effect by reducing impulsivity, aggression, and interpersonal relationships (Kasmaei & Asghari, 2017). These results encourage the use of narrative therapy to improve orphan children’s emotional well-being.

In a similar study by Beaudoin, Moersch, and Evare (2016), there were a total of 460 students from the ages of eight to ten years old. Beaudoin et al. (2016) used narrative therapy to measure the effect of this type of therapy on social interactions such as self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness. The participants were assigned to a control group and an experimental group. All participants were told to write a problematic story to measure their solving skills. However, the children in the experimental group were asked to externalize their emotions and map them followed by two narrative therapy activities (Beaudoin et al., 2016). The results suggested that children’s self-management abilities in the experimental group improved compared to those in the control group. The same results were found in the categories of self-awareness and social awareness. These results suggested that narrative therapy improved children’s social interactions, and it can be used to strengthen their confidence (Beaudoin et al., 2016).

Overall, ever since it was developed, narrative therapy has been of great help in the counseling field. Counselors and clients can work as a team to discover what is causing any type of suffering. It has had a great impact on how the client views the problem and simplifies different ways to solve them. By externalizing the problem, the person affected can have a different perspective and a clearer view of how it affects him or herself. Also, by analyzing the relationship between the problem and the people affected by it, there can be a better understanding of how to prevent it from having too much control over their lives.

References

Beaudoin, M., Moersch, M., Evare, B. S., (2016). The effectiveness of narrative therapy with children’s social and emotional skill development: An empirical study of 813 problem-solving stories. Journal of Systematic Therapies 35(3), 42-59. doi:10.1521/jsyt.2016.35.3.42

Good Therapy. (July 24, 2015). Michael White. Retrieved from https://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/michael-white.html

Kasmaei, K., Asghari, F., (2017). Comparative study of the effects of narrative therapy and play therapy by group approach on inhibiting impulsivity reducing aggression and increasing interpersonal relations. Middle East Journal of Family Medicine, 15(4), 24-33.

White, M., Epston, D., (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.