Narrative Therapy for Couples (Essay Sample)

Narrative Therapy for Couples
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Narrative Therapy for Couples
Indeed, the family is among the major elements of satisfying the spiritual, emotional, and material needs of an individual. Despite being on the decline, marriages have been the priMary avenue through which various individuals seek intimacy and love (Mohammadi, Sohrabi & Angdam, 2013). According to Mohammadi et al. (2013), intimacy is "a broad concept involving discussion about life details to disclosing lateral private feeling.” In marriage, several problems including unlimited criticism, financial challenges, emotional rejection, and disputes destroy the level of intimacy between couples. Notably, establishing and maintaining emotional needs and intimate relations is a skill and art that require training. In this regard, narrative therapy has proven to be the best approach for couples to ensure that they meet their partner’s emotional needs. Mohammadi et al. (2013) underscore that couples’ skill of preserving intimacy decreases social and family disorders. Indeed, narrative therapy as a new storytelling approach establishes personal feeling necessity between couples and encourages them to fight the problems at hand (Mohammadi et al., 2013). In narrative techniques, the therapist helps the couple to create new stories with the goal of externalizing the problem. As Mohammadi et al., (2013) describes, narrative therapy promotes communicative development and personal potential in a marriage. Impressively, research has indicated that by narrating the past incidences, couples can cope with the challenges. Thus, this paper will look into narrative therapy as a way of treating marital problems.
In the past few decades, various researchers have made attempts to test the effectiveness of narrative therapy in treating marital disorders. In this regard, Mohammadi et al. (2013), conducted a study involving 20 couples. 40 individuals were divided into two categories each comprising ten couples and one group served as a control experiment (Mohammadi et al., 2013). The questionnaire used to collect data had 87 questions which purposed to measure the couples’ intimacy. Additionally, the intimacy scale created by Walter and Tampson in 1983 was employed in testing the questionnaire’s validity. The results of the experiment indicated that narrative therapy considerably improves communicative and emotional intimacy (Mohammadi et al., 2013). Additionally, the study discovered that distressed couples do not discuss the positive aspects of their relationship (Mohammadi et al., 2013). Besides, couples that spend more time in narrative therapy and telling of life stories have better chances of decreasing marital disorders (Mohammadi et al., 2013). According to Blanton & Avrid (2001), “narration of situations by imposing of power by one of the couples like in design making is done as one of the alternatives” (as cited in Mohammadi et al., 2013). Notably, from the study, Mohammadi et al. (2013), concluded that narration decreases domination and control of a situation in couples and they eventually accept to let go. Moreover, narrative therapy enhances the probability of a solving the underlying problems by developing positive attitudes towards one another and the situation.
Markedly, narrative therapy relies mostly on a metaphor of stories. According to McCoy, Ross & Goetz (2013), a metaphor of stories enables therapists to view clients’ challenges as stories that are in development (McCoy et al., 2013). Healing in narrative therapy is not focused on solving problems, but instead aims at broadening the stories in an individual’s life to contain more positive thoughts and memories about themselves (McCoy et al., 2013). For instance, if a client claims that he is depressed, they are establishing a narrow description of themselves since the depiction does not provide for alternative explanations (McCoy et al., 2013). In this case, the client may be a successful businessman, a caring son, and a loving father but still view himself as depressed. The narrative therapy approach will allow the therapist to recognize how the client’s life and persona become entwined in the thin depiction of being a depressed individual (McCoy et al., 2013). Strikingly, narrative therapy approach entails several steps. The first step is establishing a witnessing structure. Indeed, it is necessary to develop a structure to accomplish witnessing, telling, and retelling stories (Freedman, 2014). For example, as one partner retells the story, the therapist will ask the other to be in a witnessing or reflecting position to hear and comprehend the story as it is told by the other partner (Freedman, 2014). After which, the partner who has been listening to the story will be asked to contribute to the meaning of the story as a way of retelling and adding richness and thickens the story (Freedman, 2014). The Therapist can then ask questions the partner who initially told the story to engage. Thus, through this process, couples