Narrative Therapy Techniques: Why the Best Therapy Isn't One-Size-Fits-All

When people look for help with anxiety, relationships, self-doubt, or other struggles, they often encounter therapies offering particular techniques or strategies for addressing them.

Many of these strategies have been developed by studying large groups of people. The hope is that if something has helped enough people experiencing a similar problem, there is a reasonable chance it might help you too.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach. But one of the things I often tell clients in a first session is that narrative therapy starts from a very different assumption.

We don't want to begin with a strategy designed to work for a million people.

We want to develop something that fits your life.

What Makes Narrative Therapy Different?

Imagine buying a suit that was designed to fit a million people.

It might fit you reasonably well. It might need some alterations. Or you might discover that something designed to accommodate everyone doesn't actually fit anyone particularly well.

Therapy can sometimes work the same way.

If two people come to therapy struggling with anxiety, for example, it can be tempting to assume that because we have given the problem the same name, the same solution should work for both of them.

But their lives may have almost nothing else in common.

What anxiety is asking of each person may be different. The experiences that have given it credibility may be different. What each person fears losing may be different. Their relationships, histories, hopes, responsibilities, and reasons for wanting something to change will be different.

Why would we assume the same strategy should work for both?

We Don't Know What Will Help Until We Know You

This is one of the things I value most about narrative therapy.

Your therapist doesn't need to enter the first session already knowing what you should do.

In fact, we think there is something important about not knowing too quickly.

Before deciding what might help, we want to understand what is happening in your particular life.

We might become curious about how the problem has gained influence. We might wonder about ideas you've been taught about how you're supposed to live. We may hear something in a story you tell that seems insignificant to you but suggests another direction worth exploring.

And as we come to know more, possibilities begin to emerge.

Not from a manual.

From the conversation.

A Different Way of Thinking About Narrative Therapy Techniques

This is why the phrase narrative therapy techniques can be a little misleading.

Certainly, narrative therapists have developed particular ways of listening and asking questions. But we don't think of therapy as selecting the correct intervention from a toolbox and applying it to a problem.

The question isn't:

“What technique works for anxiety?”

It is closer to:

“What might become possible if we understood this person's relationship with anxiety—and their own life—more fully?”

That difference changes the direction of therapy.

Instead of beginning with what the therapist already knows about people with anxiety, depression, relationship problems, or self-doubt, we begin with what we don't yet know about you.

Your Knowledge Matters

There is another important consequence of this approach.

You aren't simply the recipient of the therapist's expertise.

You have knowledge about your life that no therapist could have before meeting you. You know things about the people who matter to you, what you've lived through, what you have tried, what you've refused to give up on, and what kind of life would feel worth moving toward.

Some of that knowledge may be difficult to see when a problem has been dominating your attention. Therapy can help bring it into view.

Our expertise isn't supposed to replace yours.

Ideally, the two come together to create possibilities neither of us could have known beforehand.

What Might We Actually Do?

This doesn't mean narrative therapy is just talking without direction.

Quite the opposite.

Our conversations can lead to very practical responses to problems. You may decide to do something differently between sessions. We may develop a way for you to respond when a familiar problem shows up. Something we discover might lead to a conversation with your partner, child, parent, or friend. We might even create something together that helps carry what we discovered in therapy into the rest of your life.

But here's the important part:

We don't know what any of those things will be before we know you.

Whatever we develop should make sense because of something we've learned about your life not simply because other people with a similar problem have been told to do it.

Therapy Designed Around a Particular Life

At SoCal Narrative Therapy, we don't want you to become better at following someone else's instructions for how to live.

We want therapy to help us discover responses to problems that are connected to your own knowledge, relationships, commitments, history, and hopes for your life.

That means the strategies we develop together may be wonderfully specific.

They may not work for a million people.

They may not work for a thousand.

They might only make sense for one.

You.

And that's the point.

The therapy should fit your life, rather than asking your life to fit the therapy.