On their website, Jill Freedman and Gene Combs posted and excellent description of “In the day-to-day work of narrative therapy. In January 2007, a group of narrative teachers participated in a wonderful narrative gathering in Cuba, Encountering the Spirit of Community in Narrative Therapy and in Cuban Social Programs, further adapted this list.

 

In the day-to-day work of narrative therapy, we:

  • Start by seeking to join people in their particular experiential worlds (not by educating them about ours).
  • Listen to what they say as stories: not “facts” or clues to deep meaning or symptoms to diagnose, etc.
  • Try to understand the stories through which people are currently organizing their lives and what they find problematic about those stories.
  • Strive to perceive people as separate from their problems.
  • This tends to unpack and unmask problem-supporting stories and discourses.  (This process is an important part of “deconstruction.”)
  • Listen for openings (exceptions, unique outcomes) in problematic stories.
  • Expand openings by asking questions that invite people to retell and re-experience the openings so that they become rich, thick narratives whose meanings may be able to overshadow the meanings of the problematic stories.
  • Collaborate, through the use of reflecting teams, letters, documents, and communities of concern, in the circulation of the preferred stories so that they have an audience.

Chris Behan  Aileen Cheshire; Gene Combs, David Epston, Jill Freedman,  Dorothea Lewis, Marilyn O’Neill, Wally McKenzie, Peggy Sax and Gaye Stockell all compiled a handout for participants about narrative therapy in practice:

In the day-to-day work of narrative therapy, we:

  • Start by meeting people where they are.
  • Listen to what they say as stories: not “facts” or clues to deep meaning or symptoms to diagnose, etc.
  • Listen to develop an understanding of the stories through which people are currently organizing their lives and what they find problematic in those stories.
  • Regard people as separate from their problems. This helps to unpack and unmask problem-supporting stories and discourses.  (This process is an important part of “deconstruction.”)
  • Collaboratively identify values and scales in people’s cultures that support or encourage the problematic aspects of people’s life narratives.
  • Listen for initiatives or events that wouldn’t be predicted by problematic stories.
  • Ask questions that invite the telling and retelling of these initiatives and events so that they become expanded into rich, thick narratives that reflect people’s preferred identities and projects.
  • Collaborate, through the use of outsider witness groups, letters, documents, and communities of concern, in the circulation of the preferred stories.