Drawing on the assumptions of a dialectical–constructivist model of therapeutic change (Greenberg & Angus, 2004), Dr. Angus views productive client narrative expression as arising from a dialectical interplay of autobiographical memory storytelling, emotional differentiation, and reflexive meaning-making processes. Each of the three narrative process modes also have a corresponding therapeutic goal:
- helping clients translate lived stories into told stories in order to fill in the gaps of what has been forgotten or never fully storied, and hence, understood;
- helping clients experientially "relive" and more fully enter their own stories with an aim to accessing, symbolizing, and differentiating primary emotions and articulating new understandings of lived experiences; and
- helping clients reflect on and construct new meanings in relation to new emotions and stories emerging in the therapy hour and support self-narrative reconstruction in light of the emergence of new perspectives on self and others.
Taken together, Dr. Angus believes that the three narrative modes and their accompanying therapeutic goals contribute to the development of more coherent, emotionally differentiated personal narratives that provide clients with a greater understanding of themselves and their interactions with others in the world. She has found that the establishment of a strong therapeutic bond is an essential precondition for a client to disclose salient personal memories to a therapist and, in turn, for a therapist to empathically enter the experiential world of a client's felt emotions, meanings and beliefs.
It is through narrative expression that clients externalize emotionally salient past experiences so that "lived stories" become "told stories" (Stern, 2004) and can then be shared with others and reflexively looked back upon for further understanding and meaning-making. The narrative organization of emotional experiences supplies a temporal, sequential timeframe that helps clients to identify a beginning, middle, and end to their story so that causal connections between actions and emotions can be identified and meaningfully understood.
In her work with clients, Dr. Angus has found that personally significant narratives are often marked by the expression and evocation of emotions, and so she listens for stories that are emotionally charged and experientially alive as a productive focus for further emotional exploration and meaning-making in the therapy hour. As the significance of emotions can only be understood when organized within a narrative framework that identifies what is felt, about whom, and in relation to what need or issue, Dr. Angus has also found it important to help clients "story" disconnected emotional experiences for further self-understanding and meaning-making. When clients shift from reactive maladaptive emotions to accessing primary, adaptive emotional responses when telling their stories, the emotional meaning of those stories begins to change.
Dr. Angus believes that the construction of new emotional meanings emerging from primary adaptive emotions is a primary mechanism of story change in psychotherapy. As such, she uses both narrative and emotion markers for the identification of key processing task during the therapy hour, and she has found the strategic use of open-ended, scaffolding questions to be an invaluable tool when engaging clients in productive story-telling, meaning-making, and emotional differentiation processes.
Finally, while it is important to focus on client stories of distress, disappointment, and emotional pain for self-narrative change, it is equally important to help clients identify and story personal experiences of resilience, hope, and positive outcomes that challenge negative views of self and enhance a sense of client agency and desire for personal change.
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