Kenwood Therapy Center was established in 2000 to provide comprehensive individual, couple and family therapy for children, adolescents and adults. Over the past seven years, Kenwood Therapy Center has grown to house nine full and part-time licensed therapists offering a range of specialties. The staff works from a Narrative Therapy base to develop insight into the stories of the client’s life. The team members also draw from their varied experience and research on the best ideas of current theories and practices in the field. As the practice grows and changes, Kenwood Therapy Center still holds to its core objective to help its clients re-author life's narratives.

About Narrative Therapy

Kenwood Therapy Center uses Narrative ideas and approaches as the foundation for work at the Center. Narrative Therapy is a growing set of ethically based and innovative therapy practices which recognize that people use narrative (or story) to make meaning of their lives and to construct their identities. Accordingly, people can change their lives and identities.

Narrative Therapy Ideas and Practices

You Are the Expert
People are the experts in their own lives and problems are separate from people. Narrative therapy assumes that people have many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that will assist them to reduce the influence of problems in their lives.

The Person is not the Problem
Avoid thinking or speaking of those consulted with or their loved ones as the "Problem." Rather, the Problem is the Problem, and we strive, with compassion and understanding, to ally with people to help them stand up to or change their relationship to problems and reclaim their lives from their influence.

Externalized Conversation
A client may say, "I am depressed," and their therapist might respond, "How did you notice Depression first influencing your life?" This is an example of how therapists separate the person from the problem. This can help move from problem-saturated identities toward more rich and full descriptions of life and can help put problems in their broader contexts.

Life is Multi-storied
Just as ones’ preferred identity may be rendered invisible by problems, so also one may look back at life and see little, except a problem-saturated, hopeless history. A therapist may ask unusual, exceptional, and curious questions that help put to words thinly described hidden stories of richer understanding, strength, possibility and hope. In this way, people can creatively reclaim or construct, with the help/support of others, preferred realities and identity.

Therapist: Influential, But De-centered
Kenwood Center therapists strive to be "influential but de-centered"; keeping the clients and their ideas and preferences central in the relationship. Therapists are responsible collaborators and co-authors with clients, rather than all-knowing experts that tell them how to live their life. While therapists may share ideas and experiences regarding ways a problem can influence a life, they prefer to first acknowledge and build on a clients unique story, wisdom and resources. The preferred view is the "therapist as an anthropologist or archeologist"; respecting and making more visible a clients own words, ideas, theories and practices of life.

Collaborative: The Particular Context
Problems can isolate people and make it hard to find options, possibilities and connections. A therapist may ask clients, with full approval and understanding, to sign release forms to allow collaboration with key family members, relatives, friends, associates, and involved professionals, who may be helpful or concerned. Any requested assessment, report, diagnosis, letter or test is fully reviewed with the client. All collaboration is done in a sensitive, responsible, ethical, legal, diplomatic and creative manner.

The Background Context
In the background of many problems can be a history or experience of injustice and cultural difficulty. Therapists spend some time considering such socially constructed, taken for granted stories of family, gender, culture, ethnicity, sexuality, economics, faith, etc., and their influences in a client’s life and identity. This can help make such influences more visible and to help a client decide more clearly if those ideas and practices may fit with what they want in their life and relationships.