Narrative Therapy

I have trained most intensively in Narrative therapy which is a practice that embraces the power of retelling the stories of our life to gain insight and tools for facing the future.

I often utilize narrative based approaches to help the client distance themselves from the problem and re-write their life history with empowerment and understanding.

Narrative therapy helps us to externalize our problems so that they become tangible. Often, when we feel have issues, it can be easy to see ourselves as a fundamental problem, even the antagonist of our own story. I want to assist you in developing an awareness of the story you are living, to deconstruct unhelpful narratives, and to build your story in a way that emphasizes meaningful story that gives you purpose each day to embrace being you.

In London, she participated in an intensive Solution-Focused and Narrative Therapy training at the Brief Institute.

I believe we all story our lives against the backdrop of our personal discourse, family discourse, and societal discourse. Some of the stories we identify with have been beneficial yet others have been less helpful or even hinder us to reach the goals and contentment we seek. I work from a strengths-based approach to work collaboratively with clients to create change and to coauthor their stories and strive for the change they are seeking.

I am a big believer in the power of stories, especially those we tell ourselves. In my work with individuals who have a significant trauma history, this modality is especially powerful. Exploring the way that you view yourself in the world reveals a lot and changing this can have major impacts on a person's life.

As a post-modern approach, Narrative Therapy centers you as the expert of your life. My role is to ask questions to bring you through processing your life in a way that allows for you to re-examine and re-narrate in a way that is empowering and clarifying. By doing so, we'll discuss carrying that empowerment into how you "write" your life going forward.

I avoid thinking or speaking of those I consult with or their loved ones as the problem. Rather, the Problem is the Problem. I want to know you apart from your problems, so that I can stand with you against the problems that attempt to influence you. To highlight this separation I use a technique called "externalizing." For example, if you say, “I am depressed”, I might ask, “How did you notice Depression first influencing your life?”

You are the master of your own story and how you perceive the world around you. Narrative Therapy is all about reshaping and recontextualizing how you view the story of your life. Together we will go on a journey through your life to deconstruct the negative views you have about yourself. It’s my hope that we will be able to empower you by rebuilding how you see your life.

I have graduate-level education in narrative therapy, and have utilized techniques associated with this modality throughout my professional career.

Graphic Narrative Therapy- By working through traumatic events utilizing drawings, we are able to engage our right brain to tell the story in a way that makes sense for our left brain, (a beginning, middle and most importantly, END)! In this way, we can help our brain put away our trauma into our brain’s file cabinet, rather than having it be an “open tab” all the time! This is one of my favorite ways to work through trauma.

The stories we tell ourselves create our reality. Narrative therapy works by charting your unique story, understanding the context, influences, other characters, and key moments. This therapy is a collaborative process between therapist and client, who work together to find a new alternative storyline to support healing. Here we consider the problem as a character your story, separating the person from the problem, to empower your identity as more than just "depression" or "anorexia."

Narrative Therapy believes that as people grow and develop throughout life, they accumulate life experiences that shape a narrative around their identity, worth, and value. There are helpful narratives we can embrace about ourselves and unhelpful narratives. Narrative Therapy believes that we construct meaning around these narratives and aims to empower people to explore alternative and more adaptive life narratives.

Narrative therapy is an open and creative perspective on healing and growth. 'People aren't problems, problems are problems' is a classic one-liner. I've been practicing narrative since I was first trained in it nine years ago, and I have five years experience training other clinicians in it as well.

Lucy Cotter, MFT, has a wholehearted commitment to narrative therapy and a passion for helping individuals and couples find freedom from old stories. As co-founder of the Narrative Counseling Center in Los Angeles, I have spent years dedicated to narrative practices that look at how stories get constructed and how people can get the upper hand in creating new stories for their lives.