Narrative Therapy is gaining momentum worldwide, and ISEP’s teaching staff includes one of Spain’s most renowned specialists. Ginnette Muñoz is a consultant for the clinical area of ISEP e-Learning Training and began using this resource as a result of her experience in the world of theater as a director and playwright, and her work as a **child and adolescent psychologist**. She recently spoke in one of Catalonia’s most important newspapers, Ara, about custom-made stories as a top-tier **educational resource** for resolving conflictive situations with children.
Narrative therapy was born twenty years ago in Australia. Through storytelling, children recreate people’s lives, identifying with them and experiencing situations that help them overcome challenges. Creating **therapeutic stories** that help guide children to resolve their conflicts is a new procedure for addressing problems, adapted to the functionality of the child’s mind. “Children are learning and adults set limits, but we need to teach alternatives with language that is understandable to them, like storytelling, because their age is not ready for rhetoric or discourse,” Muñoz points out.
Currently, stories are primarily for entertainment, featuring princesses and knights as protagonists. Muñoz believes these stories lack information: “A story has a magnifying value because you take the child to their own ground, while creating a bond and moving away from sermons or punishment.” A **personalized story** serves as a mirror for the child to see what might happen if they don’t change a behavior. “You set limits through the story,” Muñoz adds in her interview.
To develop the narrative, it must be clear what needs to be worked on (aggression, fears, etc.) and what needs to be conveyed. Then it is necessary to find resources, real actions, that children can imitate in the **resolution of the conflict**. The story can never be the result of improvisation, and the outcome is fundamental: “there can be a happy ending or one that is not desired, especially in cases of children who do not tolerate **frustration** so that they understand that things do not always turn out as one wants,” says Muñoz.
The protagonist of the story can be a hero or an anti-hero and can take human or animal form. “The first has defined qualities, values that allow them to achieve any goal, while the second is contradictory, not as brave or handsome, and therefore, the child can identify more with them because they might think they are like that,” points out our child and adolescent psychologist. But in some cases, children may not realize that they are the protagonists. Narrative therapy is aimed at children aged 2 to 9, and until they are 6 or 7, they do not organize their thoughts into logical structures or clearly understand the principle of reversibility.
Humor or magic can be added, such as a fairy giving advice or a wizard warning of the consequences of the protagonist’s actions. The story must clearly reflect the negative consequences of the protagonist’s conflicting attitude or actions, but Muñoz makes it clear in the report for Ara that parents’ attitude is fundamental to correcting a certain behavior and adds, “if we keep repeating that our child is a coward, they always will be.” “Life can be reinvented, reconstructed, and storytelling is a magnificent tool for the child to see the benefits of not being so cowardly.”
Principles of Narrative Therapy
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- It is a respectful, non-blaming approach.
- It separates people from the problem and enables them to recognize their skills.
- It enriches the perspective on their own story.
- It defines the meaning we want to give to their life.
- It takes into account the subject’s external conditioning factors.
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Source: Narrative Therapy. Ara Newspaper. March 28, 2015. Read the full article (in Catalan)