MOVE 2 - Repairing False Narratives

Move 2 is often about compassionate disruption. I already gave you one. Did you catch it? The title of this section is Move 2 but the graphic is of Move 1!

In therapy, it can be very helpful to see how a narrative fits within the larger perspective of felt distress. I thought it’d be helpful to see how constructed narratives fit within a neural construct.

Constructed narratives explain why we have a particular a feeling in the context of our environment and experience. These narratives generally are self-focused (though are often framed about another person) and excluded important information.

These narratives drive our interactional behaviors. However, they can also block access to our underlying needs and longings, particularly when these needs are perceived as unresolvable. For example, narratives like "I am not worthy of love" and “you are a terrible person” are very different from one another and yet both can equally prevent our ability to receive caring, empathic responses from another person.

Contradictory experiences that occur outside moments of distress often remain unintegrated in our distressed neural constructs.

Memory reconsolidation research shows that repair requires activating and unlocking neural constructs while introducing alternate, mismatched experiences and/or instances when our expectations of “more of the same” doesn’t happen. These prediction errors are critical to changing how neural constructs hold on to maladaptive narratives.

Compassionately reintroducing exceptions, providing psychoeducation, creating adaptive models of others, and offering empathic responses helps clients evolve old narratives to more adaptive ones.

Remember, the purpose of Move 2 is always to move deeper into Move 3 or 4. Once the narrative is adapted, we will have greater access to engage the source of the feeling of the client in Move 3 or the other person in Move 4.