Narrative Therapy

Writing has been my therapy for almost 12 years now. I started writing these notes while in pretrial detention first as an apology to family and friends for the behaviors that led to my arrest. When I saw the spot I put myself by not completing my suicide plans, by having to endure what I conceived of as the unendurable, I wrote to find way of living. Prison offered no counseling, but I kept on writing to make sense of myself in this world. 

My PO seems to believe wholly that there has been no change in me from 2010. The supervised release order he is assigned to enforce requires counseling for me being a sex offender but I have not heard of her since November. I assume she is investigating the 2010 pysch evaluation finding I was not a pedophile. She did suggest regular counseling, I did that intake interview last week, and await an appointment. I would like to have someone to talk to besides myself as I keep on writing.

I think writing has kept me lucid and helped me manage my anxieties and anger. 

For these reasons, I found reassurance and justification in How Narrative Therapy Can Help Us Take Ownership of Our Stories by Veronica Esposito. I guess I hit on a real method.

Narrative Therapy is straight out of Derrida in that it sees the world as dominated by various systems, with language being the system par excellence. Because language is so essential to our world, Narrative Therapy construes everybody as inherent storytellers who—consciously or not—are crafting the narratives of our lives. It holds that these stories are crucial, as is the language that we use to tell them.

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Narrative Therapy sought to ameliorate the effects of these power structures; instead of telling clients who that they were diseased individuals in need of fixing, it empowering clients to define themselves on their own terms. It insisted that clients were the best experts on themselves, and it saw the job of the therapist as supporting clients as they authored their stories. It chose not to see anyone as inherently diseased or wrong but rather to focus on an individual’s strengths and to separate people from their problems.

Write, then. Keep a journal. Yes, the Zoloft helps but it is more of a negative aid. It protects without giving a means of growth. Get therapy. Do not think you can deal with depression on your own.

sch

2/12/22