When I sit with my clients for a therapy session, I am often told of experiences and life situations from a particular perspective. Our life, according to the Narrative Therapy framework, has much to do with the meanings we ascribe to all the events of our daily living. That difficult moment, that traumatic period of time, those joyous seasons all live within the confines of the narrative we have constructed about them and about ourselves within them.  

What you have experienced has several common characters: you, and often multiple others. An issue that we can run into is that as we live in these moments of our lives, the way we tell the story and the roles we believe we and others play/played or are playing can be maladaptive or skewed in one direction or another. We begin to assign ourselves and others, sometimes consciously or subconsciously, as one with a problem. We say things like “I’m just an angry person,” “I’m an anxious person,” or “I just don’t trust people.” This can become problematic because the issues that we identify with often shape our identity whether we realize it or not.   

The reality is, sometimes to obtain a new perspective of what you have experienced and are experiencing, you have to look at the issue as outside of you on the journey to deconstructing a maladaptive narrative about yourself or someone else in the story of your life. It is the difference between, “I don’t trust people” to “When I experienced this I started to notice mistrust with others.”