How Narrative Therapy Principles Inform Practice for Therapists and Helping Professionals: Illustrated with Vignettes

This chapter is intended for readers who do not yet practice narrative therapy or identify as narrative therapists. It organizes narrative therapy as a set of principles and focuses on helping practitioners move narrative principles into practice. This exploration of principles as a framework for narrative therapy is illustrated by the use of vignettes, which show the benefit of organizing narrative as principles for practitioners with various levels of experience and different practice areas as well as for a recently developed online training program. Principles discussed include narrative metaphor, positioning (de-centered, but influential; externalization), personal agency, subordinate story development (repositioning; absent but implicit), intentionality, identity proclamation, and deconstruction (societal and cultural; personal, day-to-day).