Narrative Therapy

By the time a family comes to us, a story has usually settled in. He is the angry one. She is the anxious one. This family cannot cope. The story is rarely accurate, and it is almost always doing damage, because people tend to grow into the account that is given of them.

Narrative therapy works directly on that. It is one of the core approaches we use in child and family counselling, and it adapts unusually well to children.

The Central Idea

The person is not the problem. The problem is the problem.

That sounds like a slogan until you watch what it does in a room. When a nine-year-old stops being “an aggressive child” and starts being a boy who has been pushed around by Anger, everything shifts. He is no longer defending himself against an accusation. He can join his parents on the same side of the table, and they can all look at the problem together.

How Narrative Work Runs

What We Use It For

• Children carrying a label — the naughty one, the difficult one, the one who ruins things
• Anxiety and worry, which externalise particularly well with children
• Anger and behavioural difficulties at home and at school
• Family conflict where everyone has become a fixed character in the same argument
• Recovery after trauma, family violence, loss or displacement
• Identity, belonging and cultural adjustment, including for young people in migrant families
• Adults whose sense of themselves has narrowed to a single hard chapter

Why It Suits Culturally Diverse Families

Narrative therapy treats the client as the expert on their own life and their own culture, and the therapist as someone asking useful questions. It does not require a family to adopt a Western explanation of distress in order to be helped, and it makes room for cultural, family and faith knowledge as legitimate resources rather than obstacles. For families from African and other CALD communities, that difference is often the reason therapy becomes possible at all.

Frequently Asked Questions