When one of my friends said he won't be needing therapy as he is strong and dealt with depression for only a year, it made me wonder what made him say these words? Is it the culture?
When it comes to therapy, some of us become extremely defensive. Honestly, even after being a therapist and having my own therapist, as any other professional, I have numerous doubts. Doubts about people acknowledging their issues vs people trying to deny them.
As psychologists/therapists, we face a few clients who are rigid in their attitude towards taking therapy and they have their own reasons. But then how do we break the big block of ice between the client and the therapist?
Do you remember the first conversation between Dr. Jehangir Khan and Kiara from Dear Zindagi. Both of them never directly talk about therapy or the issues faced by Kiara, but they start with a story about a certain friend having some issue and the visualization of buying a chair from a store. This is an example of the mixture of metaphor and narrative therapy.
As the name suggests, the client uses narration or a story to talk about his/her problems. This is one of an empowering, non-pathological ways of expressing the issue or traumatic event. It helps defensive clients as it takes off the pressure on them for being in a therapy space and helps them to get out of the stigma.
After all, it's you telling a story of your life, right?
It helps the therapist to understand the meaning given by the client to his/her issues, the traumatic event and their life. It also takes into consideration the impact that incident/issue has/had on their life and how he/she perceives the world. The therapist understands the client's language which he/she can in return use to connect with the client.
In the next blog of the series, we will dive deep into the therapeutic solutions as a part of the narrative therapy. Narrative therapy is one tool of the therapeutic process and cannot be used in extremely traumatic cases. But this approach can work wonders as a part of an eclectic approach.
Stay tuned for more knowledge on therapeutic approaches.
Loved how you have explained narrative therapy