Listening in narrative therapy: double listening and empathic positioning

Abstract

This article proposes an extension of narrative therapy’s ‘double-listening’ strategy. Based on the principle that people are multi-storied, double listening prompts the therapist to orient to two kinds of stories simultaneously. First, he or she hears the client’s explicit stories about the problem. These stories have an identity-constituting effect, and so the person positioned within them is considered a constituted subject. But the therapist also listens to sub-stories which hint at more agentive ways of being, aiming to facilitate movement from problem-saturated (constituted) positioning to agentive positioning. However, many clients do not spontaneously take this route, and critics have suggested that narrative therapists therefore rely on an unacknowledged directive, leading stance to generate this movement. In response, this article outlines a listening approach which defers attention to agentive stories and focuses in more detail on how the person is constituted in problematic stories. Here, the therapist orients to the question, ‘Who are you in this story?’ The answer is not always self-evident and often comes as something of a surprise. A theoretical examination of the relationship between person and narrative suggests that the clear, empathic articulation of the client’s constituted positioning can facilitate intentional and sometimes spontaneous resistances against it. This, in turn, clears the way for a more client-initiated than therapist-led exploration of agentive personal stories. Double listening does not explicitly attend to this resistance, which is hypothesised here as a vital intervening position between constituted and agentive positioning. A hypothetical case study illustrates these points.