In Narrative Therapy people -author their lives, or story, by defining their own existence, thereby constructing reality by choices made to give meaning to a life. This type of therapy may be viewed as a protest against the socially imposed, dominant narrative, and a means of making sense of lived experience. People can be seen as problems, or as stories that allow multiple possibilities. Award winning writer Rick Bragg uses the concepts of narrative therapy in his book All Over But the Shoutin urning it into a therapeutic narrative of autobiographical memory. Bragg contends that his book is about getting even with life; getting even with the ôrich snobsö who looked down on him because of his roots and the rural Southern way he uses English, and with his father. But his main reason for writing his memoir ôis to set one thing straightö (Bragg, 1997, p. xix). He is referring to his mother who ôbelieves that she failed,ö and Bragg wants to show that she did not fail because he became a successful journalist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, without disowning his past. Telling his story is important to him ôbecause there should be a record of my mommaÆs sacrifice even if it means unleashing ghostsö (p. xii). One of the points of narrative therapy is that it can aid in exorcising the ghosts in oneÆs life, and this can be achieved by arranging ôspecific experiences of events of the past and present. . . in a lineal sequenceö (White & Epston, 1990, p. 19).
Later in the book Bragg questions why he is attempting to ôrewrite history so late in the volume of our livesö (Bragg, 1997, p.272). In terms of narrative therapy the answer is clear. Narrative Therapy holds that people can become experts in their own lives, and view problems as separate from themselves. By re-telling the stories of his life, Bragg reduces the trauma of his childhood. ôThe narrative metaphor proposes that persons live their lives by stories . . . and that the...