‘The narrative movement in psychiatry is concerned with understanding the stories of pain and suffering told by people within context. These stories have plots, costars, villains, and audiences of accountability.
Suffering is not eliminated through the expert gaze of the law or of medicine. Putting something under the microscope does not change it. It reifies it and keeps it the same. It makes a challenging story (verb) into a noun (object, no change).
Equal partnerships are required for real change to occur. People must have a forum in which they can trust and believe in each other and simply talk about what troubles them and what they desire.
The narrative movement provides a bridge between European philosophy and concepts and the indigenous worldview and indigenous concepts of story, and how story becomes us and we become story and story is all there is.
Our work is to render all people nondefective; to celebrate each person’s unique resources, talents, and skills. Indigenous views of worth revolve around what we do in the relationships that we have.
Dominant culture constructions of social relationships render some people inferior and ashamed. Our culture thrives on large classes of people feeling that way (ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and so on).
Lack of skill in negotiating within the dominant culture is turned into feelings of personal inferiority and self-defectiveness.’