Meet Billie.

Billie is fifteen. She is very hard working. She frequently experiences an overwhelming sense of worthlessness whenever she gets a less-than-hoped-for grade at school. This worthlessness often feels overwhelmingly heavy and achy in her chest, and the feeling follows her around for the rest of the day, night and often even the entire week.

Sometimes it has the effect of driving distance between Billie and her family and friends, because that bad grade is all she can think about. Her parents are feeling frustrated because they can’t seem to offer any advice that makes any lasting difference – which makes them feel helpless. Because grades have this much power over Billie, no-one’s encouragements seem to stick and she also experiences extreme anxiety around any upcoming exams or assessments.

This affects her experience of school and her experience of herself. She would never tell anyone, but sometimes she also self-harms as a way of coping, which, while temporarily giving her a feeling of control over these difficult feelings, is having adverse effects of its own.

In this instance, my understanding of Narrative Therapy would assume that Billie’s grades had been given too much authority over her worth. A Narrative Therapy approach would have the confidence to say the bad grade has been given too much power because of its belief in the idea that people are always multi-storied.

Narrative Therapy believes that no single isolated experience could or should have the power to define a person in totality, because people’s lives are like bookcases that contain hundreds (many year’s worth) of different books tucked within the shelves of their life — books that tell countless different stories about who they are. As such, there is not only one story through which an individual can be identified or made sense of through.

For example, Billie may have gotten what she deems to be a ‘bad’ grade, but she has also received countless ‘good’ grades over the last year that she can continue to be proud of — they too could bear weight in shaping her sense of capability. Or Billie may be known by her friends and family as someone who is exceptionally caring of others. Looked at this way, while it may be true that she received a lower grade than she hoped for this time around, if she is able to meaningfully connect also with the stories that remind her she is still the caring friend, still the person who has a proven capacity to achieve and work hard, still the same person her friends loved and appreciated the day before, the ‘bad’ grade mightn’t have quite as much influence over her as it would if it were the only experience available to her through which to make sense of herself. 

Narrative Therapy also believes that a certain experience (eg a bad grade) can be made sense of in many different ways. For example, perhaps Billie experiences ADHD and learns differently to most of her classmates; perhaps Billie’s parents were arguing the night before and she didn’t sleep at all; or perhaps she has been experiencing intense chronic illness symptoms for the last three months. If any of these circumstances were true, having them brought back to Billie’s awareness would allow her to story herself in the wake of the ‘bad grade’ differently — and perhaps even more compassionately. This is because the grade becomes contextualized by the influential experiences that surround it, rather than considered only in isolation.

In the wake of a powerful problem story, having alternative stories brought to mind by a trained professional can help to move an individual’s sense of self in a healthier direction. In this way, a Narrative Therapist will work to uncover the stories that surround a certain negative experience. In doing so, the therapist will support the individual to both understand their problem more fully and invite the possibility of a more compassionate understanding of their experience, and seek out other stories through which they might also identify themselves, as well.

Amidst Billie’s experience, if she were offered a safe space to have counselling conversations that explored her experience of worthlessness in this particular way, she might, in time, begin to experience herself and her grades differently. In the future, she may likely also become less vulnerable to coming to such totalizing conclusions about her worth when she doesn’t perform as well at any one time. This is because she is now connected with an understanding of herself that is much broader and wider than any one ‘bad grade,’ or isolated moment in time.

Having this awareness won’t necessarily take away the discomfort of not performing to the hoped-for standard  (because that discomfort is, to some extent, natural) but it may help to shift some of its power so that it has less influence over Billie’s life.