Mariana Sussi

Provider information

Description

Narrative Therapy invites us to think of the problem as separate from the person: “the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem”.  Problems can attempt to totalize our experiences, and by doing so endeavor to make us believe that they are at the centre of our identity, forming what we call ‘problem saturated identity’. We call ourselves depressed, anxious, unfocused etc., and by doing so we internalize and privatize the problem as “who we are”.

Summary

Throughout our conversations with people we seek to bring forward people’s knowledge, we explore the many influences people have on the life of the problem, calling them “exceptions”. These exceptions are composed by all those times the problem invited us to act in certain ways but we did not. This is a collaborative and non-pathologizing approach that has the person that has consulted us at the centre of our work. Our conversations are always attuned to the person’s social contexts, such as gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc and how these influence the stories that they live by.