How Narrative Therapy Can Change Your Mindset

Themes: Narrative Therapy, Mindset, Solution-focused counseling
Helpful for: Anxiety, trauma, addiction, self-sabotage

When choosing to work with a counselor, it’s important to find a counselor that’s a good fit for you. From their personality to how they approach work, every counselor is different - and that’s a great thing! That means somewhere out there is a therapist who is a good match for you. Ideally, you want to find someone who allows you to feel safe, empowered, and like you’re in a space that’s beneficial for you. One of the ways to find the best fit for a therapist is to make sure that their form of counseling is also a good fit for you.

My Approach as a Mental Health Counselor

As a counselor, I tend to work from a solution-focused approach, using techniques like narrative therapy. What this really means is that I want to help individuals find a way to work with the facts of their life using their own resilience. My goal is to always make sure my clients feel empowered and more in control of their own story. We all experience so many good and bad moments in life. Being able to live a healthier life - including your mental health - means learning how to balance them all and frankly, cut yourself some slack.

Narrative Therapy

The idea behind narrative therapy is that we want to separate people from their problems or difficulties. With a little distance, it’s easier to see what’s really going on in your life. Whether you’re dealing with anxiety, trauma, an addiction or something else - stepping back and realizing that you did the best you could at any given moment is powerful. Oftentimes, we get trapped in our own story or decisions. We think about them non-stop, wondering what we could have changed or if we should do more. Those decisions become an endless loop - constantly replaying and instead of being able to move forward, we begin to focus on those past choices and self-sabotage. It makes it harder for us to move out of those difficult moments and be present with what’s really occurring.

I get it. Life is hard and there’s so many decisions to be made at any given moment. It’s important to acknowledge the decisions that we make. But the reality is that those decisions we’re focused on aren’t the last ones we have to make. There’s always something else going on we have to handle.

So we have to find ways to free ourselves from focusing on the past. In narrative therapy, we realize that we can’t change the facts. We cannot change what’s already happened. Instead, we can look back at the facts and what’s going on in the present and determine what we believe. This is how we move forward: we learn to reframe what we’ve experienced without discounting any of it. Acknowledging the difficult moments makes it easier to let go of them.

What does counseling look like?

My job is about helping you find a winning mentality amongst everything going on. We want to build your resilience and confidence in yourself. Throughout counseling, together, we’ll figure out how to tap into the resilience you already have built. Understanding how you can move forward using the strength you already have is a fantastic skill to have.

There is no right or wrong approach to therapy. Not every counselor will take this approach - and that’s okay. This approach might sound great to you or it might not. As you begin therapy, you’ll learn what you find most helpful and that should absolutely be communicated with your own counselor. There is no shame or disappointment if you realize a therapist and the way you’re exploring your own experiences isn’t working for you. That’s why there’s so many counselors! And if you think this approach sounds good to you, then let’s talk!