Narrative therapy is an approach based on the belief that each one of us carries stories about who we are. Those stories may take the form of beliefs about your worth, your capacity for success, your desirability in relationships, or even your destiny.

How do those stories come to be?

Let’s take, for example, that you may think of yourself as a very good baker. You may come to that belief through a multitude of experiences: baking treats for your loved ones, experimenting with recipes, having very strong opinions on the differences between brown sugar and white sugar in a chocolate chip cookie. What you’ve done there is take a number of events that have happened while you were in the kitchen, then put them in order and interpreted them to come to a conclusion that you are, indeed, a very good baker. All those events fit the plot you have come to understand about yourself, and with every successful baked good, your story gains more and more evidence, develops a richer and more detailed narrative. That dominant narrative will then impact how you make your decisions with, say, volunteering to make a cake for a friend’s important event, or undertaking a career in baking.

Now of course, we are not only talking about baking. You may carry a story that conflict isn’t safe because of formative relationships in your life. You may feel like the “outcast” or the “disappointment” in your family unit because you don’t follow the same “safe” path of college, marriage, kids. You may believe you are incapable of trusting others, or of being loved by another, or of achieving the dreams you keep pushing to the side. The list goes on: each one of these feelings and beliefs is a story that you have formed by interpreting relevant experiences and developing meaning that then impacts your present actions and your future goals.

Some of those stories you carry may not be only your own: we interpret and inherit meaning from our parents, our ancestors, our community, our culture. How often have you heard someone in your family say, “we don’t do that depression thing, that’s not in our family” (substitute depression with queerness, anxiety, anger, you name it). And when you hear something and see something enough times, you begin to believe it to be true.