Narrative Therapy: the benefits of writing for mental health

You do not need to have narrative skills for this therapy, which consists of telling the story of your life or of a specific vital moment. Narrative Therapy is one of the most interesting techniques in Psychology, since writing has been considered one of the most effective means to explore and release emotions. And also to understand them. And as we say, it is not about writing a novel, but about shaping the story of your life to improve your mental health or a specific psychological problem. Do you dare with Narrative Therapy? In this article we tell you what exactly it consists of.

What is Narrative Therapy

1. Narrative Therapy was proposed by Michael White and David Epston on the basis that a single reality can be understood in different ways. Thus, we ourselves see our life or our problems from one perspective, but we can always change perspective. And we can make that change through narration or story.
2. But narrating or recounting what happens to us when we go to the psychologist, in this case we do not do it to provide information about our life and to get to know us. In the case of Narrative Therapy, the stories have another function, that of making us co-authors of our narrative and that of checking, with the help of the therapist, the number of possibilities we have to understand that story.
3. The goal, of course, is to find answers or solutions to our emotional problems, alleviate emotional discomfort or suffering through our own story. Narrative Therapy goes one step beyond therapeutic writing because it places us as protagonists capable of transforming the narrative discourse, of generating new narrative actions and at the same time positioning ourselves as external readers who see the problem from the outside.

Narration and writing as a way of approaching reality

• This therapy understands the narration as a way of approaching reality. When we suffer an emotional overflow, when we are experiencing anxiety problems or suffering from depression, we cannot clearly see what is happening to us. But the truth is that we are the greatest experts in our own life, who knows more than us? Capturing our life or our vital moment in the form of a story helps us to see it more clearly and from different perspectives.
• As stated in the Degree Project on Narrative Therapy by Andrea Paola Penagos Prieto and Daniela Villa Hernández for the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, “this intervention has been used in the treatment of people who have suffered traumatic events, applying the techniques sometime after their occurrence. For example, with women victims of violence, it is about expanding their own vision of the possibilities that each one of them has or trying to build narratives that empower them based on feminism”.
• And what do we need for a narrative? We need a location or place, a time frame, some events, some protagonists, a problem, some objectives and some actions for the story to move forward and to overcome the problem.
• Narrative Therapy insists that there is no single valid explanation, just as there is no single story. Our life is our story. Sometimes that story contradicts itself, sometimes some events in history are more important than others, they impact us more or less. But that story that we tell ourselves or others to try to understand what happens to us can also vary. Why don’t we try to give our vital argument a twist?

How Narrative Therapy works

• It is important to understand that our narratives do not define us. How could they if we can change the story whenever we want? There are many ways to deal with the problem that worries us, there are many ways to narrate what happens to us. With Narrative Therapy we are not the patients, we are the co-authors. And what role does the therapist play then?
• The therapist reads our story and poses questions to our story. He does not know the answers, since they are part of what is not written in our story. And he also proposes topics of interest to change the focus of the narrative, to create alternative narratives. Alternative narratives are precisely the objective of this Narrative Therapy.
• Because the dominant narrative story can lose importance and, therefore, impact us less, if we create a different one. We can introduce changes, plot twists, transform objectives, banish preconceived ideas, provide new information and give the story another approach. In this way, by building a new story, we also build a new life.

Effective Narrative Therapy exercises for mental health

1. If your psychologist proposes Narrative Therapy, do not be afraid that he will ask you to write a novel. Nor do you need to have a gift for writing or even that writing is among your skills. It will propose some narrative exercises that will help you understand the moment you are living and find possible solutions. Do you want to try some exercises?

1. The letters. You can write to yourself, to the person you will be in 10 years, or to the person you were in childhood. You can also write a letter to a person you haven’t seen for a long time. And you don’t have to send it to them. What is needed is that you tell the story of your life in that letter or that you narrate a specific moment in your life, the one in which you find yourself lost or misplaced.
2. The mystery. Do you like mystery novels? As life is also a mystery, the exercise consists of writing down all those questions that worry you and for which you cannot find answers.
3. Memories. Memories are important because the future is also built with them, but we will have to choose carefully which memories we keep, right? In this exercise you are asked not to think about it too much when writing as many memories as you can on a sheet of paper. The page begins like this: “I remember…” and it’s your turn to continue.
4. What I like Imagine writing the novel of your life in positive. You don’t have to write a novel if you don’t want to, really. But write down who would be the protagonists, that is, the most important people in your life. The places where the novel takes place, that is, those magical places, your place in the world, the places you like to visit. Also write down the things you like to do the most, the events that motivate you, the events that you remember positively or the sensations that fill you with joy.
5. Write the negative? Of course you can do as in the previous exercise but in the negative. What people would you have preferred not to meet, in what places would you have preferred not to live or what experiences would you have liked to save yourself? But if you do this negative narrative, make sure you do it before the positive one so you end up on a good note.
6. As you can see, Narrative Therapy clearly shows the benefits of writing for mental health. Many times they will have recommended you to write a diary to improve your emotional state, to raise your self-esteem or to understand the vital moment. It is not on a whim; it is that the therapeutic benefits of writing have been demonstrated for a long time.
7. And of course you can write what you want and when you want without having to go to a psychologist, but as we always say, you do not play with mental health and it is convenient to put yourself in the hands of professionals just like we do with physical health. Writing will do you good, it will make you release tensions and emotions, but if you do it within a Narrative Therapy, it will also help you solve present and future problems.