Difference with Narrative Therapy
When presenting the idea of storytelling rehabilitation to colleagues and peers, there sometimes be a person who suggests, “Oh, so you mean it's like Narrative Therapy?”
While this is an apt comparison, as there are similarities among these therapeutic strategies, Storytelling Rehabilitation has a few key differences that I believe can aid a survivor in an alternative manner, and I will use this blog entry to highlight those differences. Mind, while I have done some reading on Narrative Therapy, I am not formally trained in the method and may make some incorrect assumptions. If you are familiar with this form of healing, please leave a note to inform me about any mistake I might make. As mentioned in the prior entry, this blog is a draft of what I hope can become a formal proposal for a method of Storytelling Rehabilitation that can be researched. With that in mind, I hope to catch mistakes as I work through these writings. Similarly, if you can recommend any resources for reading about Narrative Therapy, please leave those in the comments as well.
Furthermore, I want to be clear that I do not recommend Storytelling Rehabilitation as a substitute or improvement for Narrative Therapy. Both methods are beneficial and have the potential to help personal healing/understanding in different ways. That said, for the rest of this entry I’m going briefly describe/outline Narrative Therapy as I understand it and followed by observing how Storytelling Rehabilitation works differently.
Onto the meat of the entry — Narrative Therapy is when a client (the person working with professional consoler) will look at the story that he or she has created around his or her personal life, often regarding some circumstance or habit that is causing difficulties and/or trauma – the question is asked, “What is the story you tell yourself about how you got here”. Then, with the assistance of a professional, this story is deconstructed and rewritten by the client. As expressed at GoodTherapy.org, “Throughout life, personal experiences become personal stories. People give these stories meaning, and the stories help shape a person’s identity. Narrative therapy uses the power of these stories to help people discover their life purpose. The is is often done by assigning that person the role of “narrator” in their own story.” By being the narrator in one’s own story, a client is able to take control of how the difficulty is processed with the intention of changing the story to one that is supportive and self-affirming.
Narrative Therapy primarily takes place in a counseling session and the personal story is intended for the client’s personal understanding and shared only with the therapist. By contrast, the intention of Storytelling Therapy is to present one’s story to a public audience. Having the goal of public performance encourages the client/storyteller to word the story in a manner that can be easily understood by an audience unfamiliar with the intimate intricacies of the trauma or recovery. It also provides that storyteller with a script — if asked by a stranger, “What happened to you?” the response by the survivor can be clear, concise and consistent. I suggest that by creating a story intended for a general audience, the storyteller will have a clearer, more relatable understanding of events — a story that makes sense to the storyteller.
I’ll point out that this blog focuses on stories based around traumatic brain injury, and the amount of medical confusion that can accompany such trauma can leave a person unfamiliar with professional medicine baffled. A story that can be publicly shared and understood may leave out details and medical explanations, but having a concise, easily understandable narrative can simplify events for the storyteller/client as well. The simplification required for a public performance can make a more streamlined explanation available for the storyteller as well.
Furthermore, as I understand Narrative Therapy, the goal is for the client to become the primary narrator and to “rewrite” the story based on deconstructing his or her personal understanding of events. While this happens to some extent in Storytelling Rehabilitation, I believe it is important to get perspectives of other people as part of the story creation process. I will discuss this more in a latter entry, but I want to mention it here when observing differences between Narrative Therapy and Storytelling Rehabilitation. In my experience, gathering stories from friends and family who experienced the trauma as caregivers was a vital part of the rehabilitation and understanding that came with storytelling about my trauma. This was not about “rewriting” the story in order to process events in a new manner, but about opening my life to other perspectives on the story so I could understand alternative experiences of the same events – different perspectives create markedly different stories. There will be more about this idea in a future entry, but I want to recognize it here as a difference from Narrative Therapy.
The intention of public performance and seeking alternative perspectives of the trauma are the largest differences I observe between Narrative Therapy and Storytelling Rehabilitation. While there are likely other micro-differences I could observe with more time, my thoughts to date have dismissed these as rather inconsequential. Again, please note that I am not suggesting that Storytelling Rehabilitation be used as a substitute for Narrative Therapy. Both processes are valuable as the variance in focus will lead to profoundly different self-discoveries. What’s more, at this stage in my thought process, I believe both methods of therapy can be used in tandem — using Narrative Therapy to understand the story that wants to be told and Storytelling Rehabilitation as a way to find the best method to express it.
Thank you for taking the time to read these thoughts. It’s exciting the share this journey of thought and I am exciting to see how it evolves. That said, please do share comments with concerns or questions. Also, if you know anyone who might find value in these entries, I encourage you to share. Wishing the best as this New Year unfolds. Keep in touch and may the best stories tumble your way.
