ABSTRACT
Social life abounds with the telling of stories. In the most literal sense, spouses and partners commonly give accounts of the events of their day when they return home from work and friends entertain one another and seek support by relating humorous or troubling episodes from their daily lives to what they hope will be a responsive audience. Surrounding and sustaining these (inter)personal processes of narration are all manner of social and cultural discourses, also structured in narrative terms, in forms ranging from time-honoured origin myths and parables to contemporary television shows and films (Neimeyer and Levitt 2001). It is hardly surprising, then, that when people’s life stories become too chaotic to understand, too restrictive to be sustained, or too painful to bear privately, they often seek the counsel of culturally sanctioned healers whom they trust will be able to hear what others cannot, and provide valued perspective and direction for how a problematic life story might be lived differently. Our work is premised on the assumption that this seemingly ubiquitous narrative impulse carries profound implications for the study and practice of psychotherapy (Hermans 2002).
