Mahoney & Daniel, Dunaresque et al.

• Clinical intervention within the correctional system

  • Based on clinical wisdom derived from traditional positivist theories
  • Lacks cultural and gender relevance to the predominantly minority female population
  • Tends to pathologize rather than empower them
  • Authority based, further reinforcing feelings of powerlessness in incarcerated women
• Narrative therapy


  • A primary vehicle for helping the multiproblem female inmate become more efficacious
  • Challenges feelings of hopelessness, loss of control, and disillusionment in an empowering, self-directed, and respectful way
  • Increases their ability to regain a sense of direction in their lives
• Narrative approach


  • Parallels the philosophical underpinnings of clinical practice - concern for human dignity, equity, and self-determination
  • Emphasizes strength rather than pathology
  • Recognizes the effect of oppressive societal forces on individual functioning
• Narrative theorists believe many realities coexist
• For the majority Black and Hispanic female prison population, oppressive societal structures inherent in racism, classism, and sexism often work in tandem with other societal forces to further impinge on their functioning and devalue their status
• These women have been given the message that they are the problem, and their dominant narrative is often one of failure
• Language


  • Essential for understanding everyday reality
  • The storying of experience is dependent on language
  • The meaning we ascribe to our lives and relationships
• For incarcerated women, their marginalized existence often silences their voices or renders them less persuasive than other voices
• Traditional intervention approaches applied within correctional settings often perpetuate the power relations that silence these women's voices
• Narrative therapy


  • About the retelling and reliving of stories
  • Allows incarcerated women to tell their stories, many of which were untold and/or unheard
  • Enables a broader understanding of cultural and contextual factors implicated in them
• Goal of narrative therapy


  • The generation of alternative stories that incorporate previously neglected aspects of lived experience
  • Challenging those stories that limit the possibilities for change
  • Helping clients understand and then broaden and change the stories around which they have organized their lives
• Narrative approach to treatment

  1. Deconstruction phase - Gradually deconstructing the problem-saturated stories that incarcerated women tell themselves through questions that challenge the client's narrow view of reality and draw out other aspects of the client's life that have been ignored

  2. Reconstruction phase - Clients are helped to reconstruct their views of reality by broadening their life stories, expressing previously neglected aspects of lived experience
• The correctional setting poses unique challenges for the implementation of narrative strategies
• Correctional institutions place their emphasis on assessment techniques that largely rely on behavior profiles
• Given the time or workload constraints in a jail or prison setting, efforts should be made to ensure that intervention begins as soon as possible after the client's incarceration
• Soon after the client begins to demonstrate stability and growth, it may be necessary to introduce group therapy
• Externalizing the problem


  • A key approach in helping clients separate themselves from their problem
  • The problem is decentered outside the person and so viewed as an internal impingement that needs to be changed
  • Through the use of metaphors and reflective questions, the clinician listens to the client's definition of the problem and encourages them to objectify and at times to personify the problem
• Questions that may encourage more validating stories for inmates

  • Who recruited you into such an identity, or who assisted in the composition of the story?
  • What have been the effects of this identity in terms of the actions that you can or cannot accept as your own?
  • To what extent does this identity hold you back from certain thoughts, desires, values, and actions?
  • What intentions does this identity have for your life?
  • Do you have other intentions for the paths your life could take?
  • Do your own intentions sometimes get clouded or overshadowed by the intentions that follow from this identity?
• After the client's problems have been externalized and the problem stories explored, clients can be invited to explore aspects of their lives that do not fit the problem story
• Clients might be invited to think about those times when they were able to step out of the problem identity and to speak out and stand up to the negative voices that attempted to confuse them
• As a next step in the therapeutic process, clinicians using this approach should invite clients to talk about which life direction they prefer
• If clients indicate that they prefer the new alternative stories of themselves, they can be helped to find ways of making these stories endure in the face of temptations to return to the old stories
• This reading calls for the interruption and interrogation of narrative therapy's colonial associations and the co-option of narrative therapy by psychiatry under the guise of progressiveness
• Discernment is needed regarding the potential for narrative therapy to be characterized by anti-colonial workings
• An anti-colonial approach views institutions as operating to serve neoliberal ends and bodies in power
• Local knowledge and colonized resistance is integral to dismantling structures of power and imposition
• The anti-colonial discursive framework centers the experience of race and Indigeneity in every analysis of power and domination, while recognizing the interconnectedness of experiences based on all forms of oppression and viewing collective resistance as necessary to emancipation
• The privileging of interventions born from euro-western spaces and people, and are concerned that practices traditional to Indigenous and racialized communities gain legitimacy only after similar approaches are utilized by the authority of psychology and psychiatry
• Cloaked in neutrality, the intersection of story and power results in dominant narratives that categorize and control bodies through the marrying of micro and macro governing mechanisms
• Politicized storytelling can be identified in relation to Black feminist thought, where individual and collective storytelling is claimed as pivotal to resistance and revolution, resulting in the creation of alternative knowledges that are based on lived experience and developed in community through dialogue
• This approach locates psychiatry's integration of narrative therapy in the neoliberal geography of recovery and marketization, where social problems are coded as individual struggles, personal stories are used as mental health marketing material, and the burden of wellness enables psychiatric governance
• Narrative therapy recognizes language as political, acknowledging the impact that stories have on the subjugation of personhood, the organization and interpretation of experience, the construction of reality, and the positioning of futures
• Narrative therapy recognizes that the narrative context in which individuals operate informs outcomes
• Narrative therapy

  Approach that rejects the psychiatrization of human experiences and pathologization of individual distress, making visible the violence enacted upon bodies who are consumed and victimized by the psychiatric gaze
• Narrative therapy

  • Locates psychiatry's integration of narrative therapy in the neoliberal geography of recovery and marketization, where social problems are coded as individual struggles, personal stories are used as mental health marketing material, and the burden of wellness enables psychiatric governance
• Narrative therapy


  Born out of a need to counter traditionally biomedical therapeutic approaches that focus on individual pathology and essentialized origins of distress, locating problems within the individual
• Narrative therapy


  Informed by Foucauldian notions of power/knowledge and discourse, rejecting claims of objective truth, and instead seeking to harness the power of discourse for the purpose of understanding human experience and developing responses to distress
• Language


  Critical to shaping meaning and political, acknowledging the impact that stories have on the subjugation of personhood, the organization and interpretation of experience, the construction of reality, and the positioning of futures
• Some narrative therapists reinforce dominant ways of knowing by failing to deconstruct dominant discourses and neglecting to interrupt or challenge conditions of possibility in relation to interlocking systems of oppression
• Narrative therapy steps


  1. Identifying the problem story, identifying the dominant discourse

  2. Externalizing the problem story, politicizing the problem story

  3. Developing the alternative story, developing alternative discourse

  4. Thickening the thread, making it collective