An Overview of Narrative Theory

Narrative Theory (NT) is a descriptive framework with robust therapeutic implications for compartmentalizing and cataloguing our personal experience and our interactions. In NT, fundamental units of experience are aggregated into larger, familiar experiences. These units of experience are informed by Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen, but the concepts have been adapted into a contemporary Western framework.

The primary focus of NT is the (shocker) narrative. In NT, a narrative is simply a collection of thoughts that forms a perspective about some target. Why bother with the narrative? For 2 reasons: 1) narrative is at the heart of conflict and worthy of attention and 2) Narrative is at the heart of our interactions, our decisions, our relationships, and the way we feel about ourselves.

Narratives Generally

What do we mean by narrative? Narrative here is defined as a way of thinking about some thing which often involves a collection of thoughts. Narratives often have a valence, which is to say they’re charged. They can be charged positively or negatively, but if we just left things at positive and negative we’d lose a ton of nuance. Charge typically results in assignments of good or bad, right or wrong, like or dislike.

Normally when we talk about narrative we’re talking about a person’s story about something (called the narrative target), usually about a situation, like a fight with a partner or family member or coworker, or maybe a narrative about a politically charged event. In NT we also look at narratives about the self, about others, especially those in competitive tribes (often political these days), as well as both the immediate and distant future. These narratives form a special set of “Key Narratives” that merit special attention.

The Saran Wrap

These narratives constitute a layer of perception called the Saran Wrap. The Saran Wrap is the projection of values, motives, expectations, and even names and physical identities from our mind and out onto the world. The reason it’s called Saran Wrap is because of how neatly it conforms to the shape of the outside world, making it hard to see unless we happen to disturb it. Remember that the Saran Wrap is also something that applies to our perceptions of ourselves, which can lead to distortions, harsh (or sometimes inflated) self-evaluations, and accompanying changes in self-worth. These changes impact our interactions with others and our life-outcomes immensely.

Narrative Styles and Narrative Maps

NT is about understanding some of the changes in narrative. That includes: how our styles of thinking change, how those changes are reflected in the body and in our behaviors, and how to think about these different styles without getting locked into the narrow framework of “emotions and feelings” belonging to modern therapy. Part of this will involve being deliberate and precise about our use of words like feeling and emotion to avoid confusion and achieve clarity.

While narratives have general styles, they also have signature styles that are personality and unique to the individual. The signature styles are in flux, and, mapping all the narrative styles a person typically goes through during a day, we can create a map of one’s narrative styles.

Narrative Dynamics

The next topic in NT is narrative dynamics, which describes how narratives form, how they interact with each other (usually in the context of conflict, but also with persuasion), outcomes of interaction and their relationship to perceived rank, and resistance to narrative change and the role of certainty and activation.

At some point we’ll also discuss taxonomies in NT, which are more theoretical and philosophical than practical.

Practical Stuff

All of the above is meant to be descriptive rather than normative. It makes no real claim as to what you, the reader, should do to change things. It just describes the situations we find ourselves in. The second chapter of NT is about making improvements in our life to bring it into harmony more than achieve any specific goal. That includes both using NT to encourage conflict resolution and empathy between feuding sides, as well as using NT to examine our own privately held narratives about ourselves and others.

One component of this is meditation, which is essentially, but not only, a way to loosen the grip of narrative on our perception.