Last week, we had this practical session about narrative writing. In the beginning, we were given a lecture by Dr. Retna. This is not the first time I came across the word “narrative”, apparently it has much more to tell compared to what I know.
Narrative means a spoken or written account of connected events, in short, a story. While, narrative writing means study of people’ stories that involves creating, collecting, and analyzing written text. Dr Retna told us about the various uses of narrative writing in the lecture. She said that narrative writing focuses on the past, recent or ongoing experiences of people’s life. People talk about their problem saturated and oppressive stories. Through the conversation, the person might discover the “untold” story and previously hidden possibilities in them such as their intentions, hopes, commitments, values, desires and so on.
To reveal all these hopeful, preferred accounts of people’s life, this is where the doctors come in. For example, in the medical setting, there is this practice called narrative therapy. I had done a little research. From what I got, narrative therapy focuses on a person’s knowledge, beliefs and practices to help them regain their life from a problem. For instance, normally, if we face people who had just undergone some tragedies or trauma, we chose to avoid talking about the events in front of them. This is because we don’t want to touch the victims’ sad memory.
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| "What is to give light must endure burning - Viktor Frank" |
In contrary to this, a narrative therapist would ask questions to help the victim retrieve these events and externalize the problem they are facing. Communication skills while conducting a conversation are required to find out how the traumatic event has influenced the person’s life. It is hoped that the conversation might help restore exception to the problem’s influences. By exception, it means the values and principles which would provide support to the victims to go through the problems and later an alternate direction in life.
It is in the 1980s, Michael White and his friend, David Epson developed what has come to be known as narrative therapy. Charon et al. (2006) said that the narrative medicine should be conducted. This is because the health system nowadays which places corporate concerns over the patients’ needs has made patients feeling abandoned. Nowadays, the uses of narrative therapy in doctors-patients relationship and clinical practices have been well recognized. To be able to perform narrative therapy, the skill of narrative writing is acquired. I guess this is why this practical session is made in this block. Oh, by the way, I just remember I still haven’t do the assignment of writing a narrative interview.
References :
1) lecture note by Dr. Retna: Narrative Writing
3) A review of: Charon,R.2006: Narrative medicine: Honoring stories of illnessess
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