Narrative Therapy

As a Narrative Therapist, I help you reframe and reshape the stories you tell about yourself. By exploring how these narratives influence your life, we work together to identify and build on your strengths. This approach empowers you to rewrite your personal story in a way that aligns with your values and aspirations, creating new paths for growth and transformation. It’s about finding and crafting a narrative that truly reflects who you are and who you want to become.

How we see ourselves and the world around us is contingent upon our experiences and narratives. Narrative Therapy is a good way to acknowledge why we are operating in the world as we do and it offers opportunities to make shifts, if so desired, by altering our narratives.

To me, being a narrative therapist means that I take a non-judgmental, expansive view of my clients' lives. The stories we tell ourselves or the stories that others tell us end up shaping our reality. When I work with my clients, I listen for harmful narratives or beliefs that are causing them pain. I believe that much of our pain has been put upon us by harmful narratives (from families, relationships, or society). I also believe in the potential of anyone to create the life they dream of.

We all have stories about ourselves, our relationships, and our sexuality. Sometimes these stories keep you stuck in anxiety, shame, guilt and disconnection. Using Narrative Therapy, I help you get to know these stories you have and begin to identify what you really believe and value. Narrative Therapy also involves looking at how your family, past partners, and societal messaging may impact these stories that hold you back.

Individual people and communities of all sizes understand their identity and purpose via the stories they tell. Narrative theory is about unpacking the stories we tell about ourselves and where they come from, societal stories, family stories, community stories. It's about actively choosing what stories we want to tell in the future. My practice of narrative therapy is informed by the work of Black feminists like The Combahee River Collective, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison.

I have graduate-level education in narrative therapy, and have utilized techniques associated with this modality throughout my professional career.

Narrative therapy works with clients to assist them in reframing their personal narratives and dissociating themselves from their problems. This therapeutic approach conceptualizes individuals as distinct from their issues and encourages clients to reconstruct their life narratives more empoweringly. The process of storytelling and reframing guides clients in exploring alternative perspectives on their experiences and relationships, facilitating the reshaping of their personal narratives.

I often use Narrative Therapy in my practice. Narratives are not just the stories that we tell ourselves in order to create meaning in our lives; they also influence how we define ourselves and the choices we make. A narrative therapist is a collaborator, helping clients first separate themselves from their problem, then working with them to co-create a new narrative aligned with their values.

What's your story? How does your internal narrative about yourself help or hold you back? How do we cling to certain versions of ourselves and what do we need to change? These are some of the questions we explore in Narrative Therapy. This technique is especially helpful for clients who feel stuck in their lives but aren't sure why. I help clients begin an inner dialog with themselves which can lead to insight, growth and change.

I have studied extensively through this lens which prizes the client's experience of their own world over the therapist's, offering the client maximum respect and agency. Narrative therapy is particularly helpful at not pathologizing or labeling a client as the problem, rather, the problem is simply the problem. Narrative therapy lets the client develop new stories about their lives and discard stories that no longer serve them.

Narrative ideas include the externalization of problems such that one can see oneself and one's values as separate from the problem, letting go of ideas like "I am an anxious person," and shifting to "I am actually from anxiety's influences at specific times and it impacts my life in these specific ways... Therefore, I am able to get the upper hand on it when it is harassing me." Dominant ideas that are oppressive can be deconstructed and we can come out from under Normal's damaging gaze.

I use Narrative Therapy to learn about the stories that a client tells about their life. Throughout the therapeutic process, we will "thicken the narrative" and discuss the ways that we may "re-story" our lives.

I am a huge fan of letter writing. Sometimes it's writing a letter to someone you are having conflict with and never sending it. Or maybe burning it in the fireplace. Or it's a letter to your dad, who died 10 years ago. Or your younger self, letting her know that she did the best you could. Or maybe to your future self, letting her know that she is doing her best and that it's worth it to keep going. I think it can be so cathartic to get our thoughts and feelings out on paper.

The stories we tell ourselves create our reality. Narrative therapy works by charting your unique story, understanding the context, influences, other characters, and key moments. This therapy is a collaborative process between therapist and client, who work together to find a new alternative storyline to support healing. Here we consider the problem as a character your story, separating the person from the problem, to empower your identity as more than just "depression" or "anorexia."

In London, she participated in an intensive Solution-Focused and Narrative Therapy training at the Brief Institute. Having conversations co-constructing a narrative of self in the client’s life that fits with the client being likely to achieve their best hopes. It is a re-descriptive and value-honoring approach.

As we go through our life, we build a narrative of our experience that frames how we perceive our decisions and relationships. Sometimes, these narratives are overly negative, narrow, or biased. I look forward to revising your narrative to one that is more inclusive, positive, and optimistic.

I helped co-lead a seminar on utilizing Narrative Therapy to retell our own stories and have kept it at the forefront of my therapy toolbox ever since. I enjoy using NT to take a second look at the "story we tell ourselves" (e.g. "I'll never be good enough," "That breakup showed me that I'm unlovable," "I am weak because of my feelings") and retell it from an honest and healed place (e.g. "I have worth regardless of my circumstances," "I am brave," "I am lovable").

Narrative therapy or talk therapy is a modality I use that lets my clients process their thoughts, feelings and emotions.