Rewriting Your Story

Narrative psychology begins with a simple and profound observation: human beings make meaning through story. We do not experience life as a series of discrete events — we experience it as a narrative in which we are the protagonist. The problem is that most of us inherited our stories more than we chose them — from family, culture, and early experience. Rewriting Your Story is an invitation to question them now.

The book draws on the narrative therapy tradition as developed by Michael White and David Epston, as well as the story-based approaches of Dan McAdams and others. It begins with a thorough, accessible introduction to how our self-stories operate: how they form, how they shape perception and behaviour, how they can become rigid and self-defeating, and how they can be transformed.

The practical work is organised into three phases: first, reading your current story accurately (what are you actually telling yourself about who you are, why events happened, and what is possible?); second, identifying the problem stories — the narratives that are limiting or simply no longer true — and understanding how they developed; and third, beginning the deliberate process of alternative story development, using narrative therapy techniques to find the evidence the problem story excludes.

A final chapter addresses the social dimension of narrative change: how stories are co-created with the people around us, the difficulty of changing your story when you are embedded in relationships that hold the old one, and the practices that support narrative change in a social context.