Most of us carry a running story about who we are — “I’m the one who always gives in,” “I’m bad under pressure,” “I’ve never been good at relationships.” These stories feel like facts. Usually they’re closer to summaries: a few hard moments, repeated often enough, that quietly became the whole plot.
Narrative therapy starts from a simple idea: the story is not the same thing as the person, and a story that’s stopped being useful can be re-examined, not just endured. This doesn’t mean pretending the hard moments didn’t happen, or talking yourself into a version of events that isn’t true. It means looking at which parts of the story got kept, which got left out, and whether the version you’ve been carrying is actually the most accurate one — or just the most repeated one.
In practice, that can look like asking where a belief about yourself first took hold, and whether it was ever really about you, or about a situation you happened to be in at the time. It can mean noticing the moments that don’t fit the story — the times you did hold your ground, or did handle pressure — that got quietly filed away because they didn’t match the plot.
This is the first note in a short series we’re building on narrative approaches to therapy, drawing on material I’ve been working through with Dr Vijayachandran S K. We’ll go deeper into specific techniques in the posts that follow.
If any of this sounds familiar — a story about yourself you’ve been carrying for years without really questioning it — that’s a reasonable thing to bring into a first conversation, in person or online. Message us on WhatsApp at +91 80752 87837 to book.
