Narrative Therapy Initiative

Our mission is to make all helping practices more socially just, collaborative, and accountable. We currently promote the narrative worldview as a legitimate, rigorous, highly effective and, most importantly, socially-just orientation for people seeking help. We work to grow and support communities committed to exploring, learning, and working in ways that are ethically congruent with a poststructural narrative worldview. Acknowledging that all stories are relationally negotiated, considerations of power as constitutive is critical in all knowledge claims and developments. We take the position that in the history of the helping professions, too little concern has been paid to considerations of power from this constitutionalist perspective. Without these considerations, we are deeply concerned about the way that good intentions can inadvertently become become acts of social control instead of social justice. Therefore, we understand narrative therapy as the promotion of social justice through an appreciation of the politics of meaning-making.