SOLUTION FOCUSED NARRATIVE PRACTICE

Solution Focused Narrative Practice

Solution Focused Narrative Practice

INTRODUCTION

The therapeutic modality I have chosen is Narrative therapy because I find it to be a useful approach that is not directive and instrumental, but is rather an attitudinal collaborative approach that influences a therapist's way of being. This approach does not lend itself to any specific techniques in the counseling process but makes use of a wide variety of methods of intervention to assist the individual in need.

According the narrative metaphor we all make sense of our lives through stories or self-narratives. At times our self-narratives may be thin or self-limiting and a re-authoring process may help us to remember forgotten parts of our narratives as we re-tell our new thicker self-story.

In this assignment I will explain the narrative metaphor as an approach to counselling and discuss the key concepts underlying it and the therapeutic process of narrative therapy. I will also discuss how the narrative metaphor contributed to my personal growth and self-understanding, the potential use of this approach at Crescent Clinic where I spent time, and the multicultural and ethical issues surrounding this approach.

THE CONTEXT OF NARRATIVE THERAPY

In order to explain the process of Narrative therapy it is helpful to briefly place it in the context of a paradigm shift that began in the 1950s. Several writers have contributed to this “new epistemology” which has “a common foundation in the writings of Gregory Bateson” (Searight & Openlander, 1987, p.52).

The movement has progressed through several waves. The first wave was a move away from pathologising the individual to focusing on relational “patterns that connect” (Bateson, 1979) within a system. This was a recursive process where positive and negative feedback loops maintained the stability of the system as it resisted change. Symptoms were perceived as communicating a message (Haley, 1963 Minuchin, 1974, 1981; Watzlawick, Weakland & Fisch, 1963) that a system required a change in structure (Minuchin 1974, 1981) or a change in relational dynamics (Haley, 1963). The therapist intervened in the system in a directive and instrumental way as one proffering expert knowledge and experience. This first order cybernetics (or simple cybernetics / engineering cybernetics) offered much excitement as therapists engaged in a new way of doing therapy that presented striking results with little or no insight necessary on the part of the identified patient.

A recognition that the pathology had been moved from the individual to the family (Hoffman, 1985, 1998) resulted in a second wave where the therapist was perceived as part of the system. Here one cybernetic system was recognised as observing another cybernetic system as well as the fact that the very act of observing changed the observed. This second order cybernetics (or cybernetics of cybernetics / biological cybernetics) was much less directive, to the extent that it was at times criticised as irrelevant. The focus was on how people constructed their realities.

A third wave moved away from the mechanistic model of cybernetics to a more hermeneutic or interpretive model (Anderson, 1997; Anderson & ...