Stories are powerful and compelling. They’re why we go to the movies, attend plays, read fiction, or watch our favorite TV shows. At the same time, everyone has a story to share when it comes to their own life. This is no different when you’ve struggled with trauma, substance abuse, and addiction. As a result, your story matters more than you’d think within the context of your recovery from addiction. And narrative therapy is the tool a holistic addiction treatment center uses to harness that story for your long-term healing.
Your Story of Substance Abuse and Trauma
As you reflect back on your struggles with substance abuse, addiction, and trauma, how have they shaped your story? If you’ve been traumatized from a difficult event in your past, the effects of that trauma can linger for decades. And the impact can negatively impact the course of your life. You may struggle with a variety of issues long-term, according to the Mental Health Foundation, such as:
- Difficulty trusting others
- Challenges forming and maintaining relationships
- Being unable to look after yourself
- Emotional dysregulation
- The inability to maintain steady employment
- Difficulty finding pleasure in things you enjoy
- Over-the-top emotional reactions
- Chronic health problems and long-term illness
SOURCE: Mental Health Foundation
The effects of trauma can make daily life a challenge. Over time, you can even develop mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. These combined challenges can push you to seek ways to self-medicate with substances like drugs or alcohol. However, these substances only provide temporary relief, so you need to use them again and again, and in increasing quantities, putting you at risk for addiction.
As your story continues, you struggle daily as a result of being traumatized in the past. Adding in mental stress and addiction only makes things worse. As addiction begins controlling your life, you try and fail — often repeatedly — to quit. This can lead you to believe you’re incapable and unreliable, tanking your self-esteem and self-worth in the process. You may begin to believe your trauma and addiction are not just problems but actual aspects of your identity. Soon the person you are, and the story of your life, become overshadowed by your addiction and trauma. But your story isn’t finished yet. This is where narrative therapy for trauma and co-occurring addiction can be particularly impactful.
What is Narrative Therapy?
Narrative therapy is a unique evidence-based practice that harnesses the power of storytelling to bring about positive change and healing from addiction and trauma. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines narrative therapy as a form of treatment that helps you reinterpret and rewrite your life events into true, yet more life-enhancing stories. It’s based on the idea that we as people are capable of reauthoring our lives. This is done by deconstructing our current stories, noticing the patterns we’ve used to interpret life events or challenges in the past, and reconstructing those challenges and events in a more helpful way.
Originally developed in the early 1990s, narrative therapy emphasizes the importance of personal stories in shaping your identity and life experiences, according to EBSCO.com. What’s particularly productive about narrative therapy for trauma and addiction is that it helps you externalize the problems you’ve faced so that they’re not part of your identity as an individual. As a result, you can begin to create alternative narratives within your story that highlight your strengths, aspirations, and values. Through this process, you realize that you yourself are not the problem; you’re the expert of your own life. Problems have been part of your story, but you have the ability to change how they affect you, leading to life-altering healing.
Narrative Therapy Techniques: How the Process Works
As a therapy option utilized in trauma-informed care, narrative therapy can be effective in treating a variety of conditions rooted in trauma, from mental health disorders like anxiety and depression to substance use disorders like drug and alcohol addiction. Therapists use this versatile evidence-based practice to treat individuals, couples, and families. But what do narrative therapy interventions actually look like? At a holistic addiction treatment center like Defining Wellness, your treatment team may use the following narrative therapy techniques:
Putting Together Your Narrative
Narrative therapy starts with compiling your life story with your therapist. Much of this is centered around verbalizing your addiction story to better understand the events and decisions that transpired to lead you down that path. The dominant narrative within your life gets identified, allowing you to understand the magnitude and meaning of certain events or challenges in your life that shaped who you are today. This helps you better put your addiction challenges into perspective.
Externalization
While you may be narrating the story to your therapist, your therapist collaborates by helping you to observe yourself outside of your individual narrative. Your problems or challenges — namely, addiction, trauma, and/or mental health disorders — may be given intentionally disconnected names like “the ogre” or “the storm cloud.”
This process, called externalization, allows you to separate yourself from your past issues. The shame and guilt that you’ve internalized due to your addiction begins to dissipate as you share, and you can see your challenges with greater objectivity. As you put distance between yourself and your addiction, substance abuse, or trauma, you can more easily focus on changing behaviors that have caused your problems.
Deconstruction
Because addiction or trauma have been entrenched in your story for some time, it’s easy to develop negative beliefs about yourself. However, with your story externalized, the narrative therapy process of deconstruction allows you to unpack the meanings, stigmas, and stereotypes you’ve internalized about your struggles within your own life.
By clarifying your problem, deconstruction helps you to break it down into more manageable parts to address and resolve. Instead of previously getting caught up in harmful beliefs and generalized societal beliefs that led to shame, you’re now empowered to resiliently change your narrative with addiction resources that can help you heal.
Unique Outcomes
In this stage of narrative therapy, you identify parts of your story that don’t align with the negative narrative you’ve previously believed about yourself. These outliers are actually positive details worth noticing, such as when you progressed along your addiction treatment or made good decisions about your life.
By intentionally recalling the positive parts of your story, you can begin to reframe your overall narrative in a better light, blending success stories with your challenges. As a result, you start to understand that you’re more capable than previously thought. This boosts your self-esteem and confidence, motivating you to overcome future challenges and continue the stages of addiction recovery.
The Benefits of Narrative Therapy for Trauma and Addiction
Narrative therapy is more than just telling your story. It reshapes how you view your life, both the past and the future. As a result, it can affect positive life change that facilitates your long-term recovery from addiction or trauma. Some of the benefits of narrative therapy include:
Increased Self-Esteem and Resiliency
Because narrative therapy helps you shift a formerly negative view of your life into a positive one, it helps you hone in on your personal capabilities and successes. In turn, you learn how to build self-worth and self-esteem, as well as grow in self-confidence by reframing your story. With this better view of yourself, you can also learn to develop resiliency, knowing you have what it takes to endure future challenges and stay the course with your trauma or addiction recovery care.
Enhanced Self-Awareness
Narrative therapy helps you achieve better self-awareness in two important ways. First, it equips you to view your challenges and problems in a more objective, less personal way. This allows you to see your patterns of behavior that led to your struggles so you can make healthy changes. At the same time, the alternative narratives you create help you understand your personal values, aspirations, and strengths, motivating you to pursue the future you truly want.
Empowerment to Change
As you learn how to build self-worth and self-esteem, develop resiliency, and improve your self-awareness, you also feel empowered to take ownership of your life moving forward. Narrative therapy teaches you that you’re the expert of your life and that you have what it takes to change your story. Your struggles become a manageable challenge to overcome, enabling you to take an active role in your recovery and long-term healing.
Reduced Shame
You may not be proud of certain parts of your story. But narrative therapy shows that those events and challenges (such as your trauma, substance abuse, or addiction) don’t represent who you are as a person. Such a realization is profound and powerful, as it reduces the shame, guilt, and self-loathing you’ve likely carried for so long. With these burdens off your shoulders, you can begin to confidently alter your story without the stigmas of trauma or addiction holding you back.
How Defining Wellness Can Help You Rewrite Your Story
Narrative therapy is just one of the many ways you can learn to rewrite your story with holistic addiction treatment. At Defining Wellness Centers in Mississippi, we combine the transformative powers of evidence-based practices and trauma-informed care into a holistic, individualized approach to addiction treatment. By partnering with us, you’re equipped and empowered to overcome your struggles and build a healthier identity. To learn more about our treatment programs, contact us today.
