Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy is a highly respectful, highly effective, non-blaming approach to counselling, coaching and organizational work, which centres people as the experts in their own lives.
Dr Stephen Madigan's therapeutic work is influenced by the idea that the people coming to see him in therapy are much more complex and interesting than the narrow descriptions they often come to therapy with.
Before the first two hour session even begins, Stephen assumes that the people seeking his help arrive into therapy with numerous (and very often forgotten!) skills, competencies, beliefs, values, survival skills, commitments and abilities. Uncovering, discussing and appreciating a person's unique abilities assists them in the process of changing their 'relationship' with the problems in their lives.
His therapeutic change discussions include: a) helping clients clearly define what the patterns and language of the problem is, b) discovering how the problem affects their lives and relationships, the losses the problem orientation have incurred and the person's response to these losses c) uncovering and appreciating a persons skills, knowledge and abilities that contradict the problem lifestyle, d) helping people craft a statement of position regarding preferred pathways to change in their lives and relationships and e) helping to maintain and sustain these changes as building block solutions for long term health and change.
Stephen is highly encouraging of people to discover ways to re-author their lives and relationships according to their own preferred stories of personal health and well being. He works with clients in building a map on how best to support these preferred ways of living over the long term.
In his developing the notion that people's lives are organized by the stories they tell and those that other's construct about them, Stephen works to re-author those stories that shape and negatively affect their lives and relationships.
Stephen helps people resolve problems by enabling them to separate their lives and relationships from specific historical ideas, influences, patterns and stories they judge to be impoverishing and no longer helpful.
Stephen assists individuals, couples and families on ways to challenge certain patterns of daily living (and thinking) that they find distressing, subjugating, hopeless and abusive.