Narrative therapy; an introduction for counsellors.

Many patients come to their doctors with stories of great sadness and suffering. By our society's standards of success, these are often also stories of defeat and failure—failure to provide for or hold together a family, failure to hold down a job, failure to achieve educationally or professionally, failure to win the approval of parents or to succeed as parents—the list is endless. And yet, they are also stories of endurance and survival, often in the face of extraordinary deprivation or exploitation. People tell stories to make sense of their experience and they find meaning by telling the story to others. Life stories are continuously modified by experience and by the reaction of each listener. The reaction of a listening doctor can confirm a story of failure or offer the space and time for the discovery and narration of a different story. This gently reflective book builds on the pioneering work of the influential Australian family therapist, Michael White, to unravel these possibilities. Narrative therapy embraces a post-modern view of the extent to which social power is exerted through the validation of certain dominant assumptions and the neglect of no less valid experiences which do not conform. Too often, these assumptions constrain and limit people's stories, consign many to stories of failure and reduce their capacity to celebrate, or even recognize, achievement. In narrative therapy, people are encouraged to enrich their stories by exploring the detail and by questioning the normative value judgements by which we all censor our own stories. The focus is on identifying the damaging external constraints in people's lives, rather than, as in much conventional therapy, on “implicit pathologizing of the person”. The aim is to “challenge unrecognized imposed assumptions and ideas of others, whether individuals, family, peers, professional persons or the assumed truths of that interacting aggregate of people called society” and to retell a story which is more true to their own experience, values and aspirations. The book is aimed at counsellors and therapists who have very much more time available than the standard 10 minutes of British general practice. None the less, there is much here which feels of immediate relevance to the stories our patients tell us every day. Narrative therapy seeks to value everyone's story, to rediscover self-esteem and to invest everyone with dignity. In this way it affirms the universalism to which general practice aspires. Read in this context, this is a wonderfully supportive and stimulating book.