ABSTRACT
A narrative approach grounds thoughts in the experience and adaptive context of the person. The main advantage of a narrative approach is that it does not treat cognitions as stand-alone thought units, judged according to their orientation bias or compared with veridical perception, nor does it reduce them to products of hypothetical schemas imposing an embedded core network of perceptions on reality. The narrative approach to worry (NAW) has been developed partly on the basis of clinical experience with a generalized anxiety population. A small group of five participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) followed the NAW therapy, showing a mean clinically significant decrease in neck electromyographic muscle tension (EMG) and symptoms. Obsessional narratives were rated consistently to contain reasoning components that take the person away from the senses and towards remote possibilities and associations. There were significant differences in frequency ratings, which showed that narrative components did not overlap substantially with more traditional cognitive errors.
