Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy begins from a single idea: the person is not the problem. The problem is the problem. You are not an anxious person, you are a person that anxiety has been visiting. You are not broken, you are someone who has been living inside a story that says you are.
The stories we live inside
We make sense of our lives through stories. Not fiction, but the ongoing account of who you are, what you are like, what you can expect from yourself and from other people. Those stories feel like simple observation, like you are just describing reality. But they were written, and they were rarely written by you alone. Family, culture, school, medicine, and the wider world all contributed lines, and some of those lines have been sitting in the manuscript for decades.
Once a story takes hold, it starts filtering. If the story says you are the difficult one, every conflict gets filed as evidence and every moment of grace gets dropped as an exception. If the story says you are not enough, your accomplishments slide off and your shortfalls stick. This is also why a diagnosis is never the whole picture. It is a thin description, a few lines about a person who contains volumes. It might name something real and still leave out nearly everything about who you actually are.
Putting the problem outside of you
There is a real difference between saying I am depressed and saying the depression has been heavy lately. It sounds like a word game until you notice what each one leaves you room to do. If the problem is you, then the only available project is fixing yourself, and that is a project made of shame. If the problem is something acting on you, you can turn and look at it. You can learn its habits, notice when it shows up and when it loses its grip, and decide what you want your relationship to it to be.
So we get curious together. When did this first arrive? What does it tell you about yourself? When is it strongest, and what feeds it? What does it want from you, and what has it cost you? And, importantly, what does it not get to have?
Whose story is it?
Who taught you that you were too much, and too much for whom? Who decided that rest is laziness, that your accent is unprofessional, that your body is wrong, that your anger is dangerous? These are not neutral observations that happened to occur to you. They are stories written by dominant culture, by racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and ableism, and then handed to people as though they were personal facts about who they are.
A lot of this work is tracing a story back to its author. A story you can see the origin of is a story you get to make a decision about. Once you know who wrote the line, you can decide whether to keep it in.
The parts that do not fit
Every dominant story has moments it cannot account for. The time you did speak up. The day the depression came and you got through it anyway. The way you have protected people you love, quietly, for years. The story calls these flukes and moves on, because they do not fit.
We pay close attention to exactly those moments. They are not flukes. They are evidence of another story that has been running alongside the loud one the whole time, unrecorded and unwitnessed. Narrative work finds those moments, gets curious about what they say about what you value and what you are capable of, and connects them until that other story is thick enough to stand on. That is what re-authoring means. Not inventing something flattering, but recovering something true that got left out, and becoming the one holding the pen.
Re-authoring is not positive thinking, and it is not telling you that your problems are just a story you are telling yourself. Some things are not stories. If you are exhausted because you work two jobs and rent is still impossible, that is not a narrative distortion, that is arithmetic. If you are hurting because of something someone did to you, no reframe makes that acceptable. The work is telling the difference between the stories that were installed in you and the realities that are simply real, and refusing to use the first as a way of avoiding the second.
What this work can look like at MLC:
- Separating you from the problem, so that what you are facing becomes something you can look at rather than something you are
- Getting curious about the problem’s habits, when it arrives, what it says, what feeds it, and what it has cost you
- Tracing the stories you carry back to who wrote them, so you can decide which ones you still want
- Naming the ways racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and ableism author stories about people and pass them off as personal truths
- Finding the moments that the dominant story cannot explain, and taking them seriously as evidence
- Thickening the other story, the one about what you value and what you have actually done, until it is solid enough to stand on
- Treating you as the author and the expert, with your therapist as someone thinking alongside you rather than narrating you
- Keeping honest about what is a story and what is a condition, so that re-authoring never becomes a way of letting real harm off the hook
The therapists at MLC draw on this work because so many of the people we sit with arrived carrying a story about themselves that someone else wrote, and have been living inside it as though it were the only one available. It is not. There is almost always another story, quieter and more true, waiting to be told.
