ABSTRACT
The eighth chapter of the guidebook to Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy (MERIT) describes the third of the eight elements, which comprise the basis for MERIT. The third element involves attending to and reflecting with patients about how they narrate their own stories and describe how they think about themselves. It requires therapists to try to elicit and promote joint reflection about the patient with the events that make up their lives. While the first two elements foster awareness of patients’ experience of their own mental states in the moment, this element expands this process and asks the therapist to think with patients about their experience in specific and personal terms about the events in their lives. MERIT refers to those specific experiences and events as narrative episodes. Satisfactory adherence to this element requires frequent attempts by the therapist to elicit narrative episodes from the patient or the emergence and joint discussion of a narrative episode.
