Approaches
Narrative Therapy & Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
The way you understand your life affects what you believe is possible.
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When a problem becomes your main story (e.g. “I am depressed” or “I wish it didn’t happen to me”), you start seeing yourself through it. This story overtakes other identities and aspects of your personality, like who you are and who you may become.
Narrative Therapy calls this a problem-saturated story, because the problem defines how you see yourself and your future.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) has a similar therapeutic focus: it helps you see that the future is something you can create, and it’s something you can have a say in. It develops a detailed picture of how you want life to be different and what you would be doing differently when things are better.
Narrative Therapy helps separate you from the problem and re-author preferred stories you would rather live by. SFBT looks for the parts of the preferred future that are already happening and builds from them.
Used together, the preferred story and preferred future reinforce each other: the way you understand yourself affects the choices you make, and those choices strengthen the story you want to live by.
By the time people reach out for therapy, the problem is often the most detailed thing they can describe. Far less is being said about how they would like their life to change, and even less about who they are outside this problem.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative Therapy calls statements like “I’m hopeless” or “I’m the problem” thin conclusions. They can end up standing in for years of much more complicated experience as the events that fit the story keep being repeated and others are left untold. Narrative work gives serious attention to the experiences that the conclusion does not account for. In therapy, you re-write your story, which in turn lets you generate new possibilities for how you live your life. It creates a sense of agency, so that you know you can influence your life and change the problems that affect you.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy
SFBT gets very specific about the word “better.” It asks what you would notice in an ordinary day and what you would be doing differently even if other people or difficult circumstances stayed the same. If some of that has already happened, even briefly, SFBT asks what was different and how you did it. In fact, the more clarity and specificity you bring to your goals, the more likely they are to be achieved. Like Narrative Therapy, SFBT emphasizes your involvement and capacity to change your life.
Narrative Therapy can completely change the way you see yourself. Once the problem loses its influence over how you see yourself, your self-definition, and your actions, you start to live out your preferred story. Through living your preferred story, you start to recognize that you are also living more and more within your preferred future. This feeling can be incredibly freeing.
SFBT and Narrative Therapy make that sense of possibility feel real in your day-to-day life. You start seeing yourself doing things differently and having experiences you once dismissed as ‘not something I could do.’ Life feels more open because you are no longer looking at the future through the same narrow set of expectations. When this experience accompanies you outside of therapy and into the rest of your life, you’ll know that you’ve found the change you were looking for.
Through therapy, you’ll see yourself and the way you live differently. You’ll notice yourself doing things that no longer fit the old conclusions you had about who you are, and it becomes harder to keep treating those conclusions as the whole story. Every new action you take creates a snowball effect, opening up more possibilities. You can be the person you want to be, with the future you want to have.