Narrative Arts Therapy

What is Narrative Arts Therapy?

The Story We Live

Humans are wired for storytelling. Long before written language, we painted on cave walls, sang around fires, and shaped clay into figures – expressing the mysteries of existence through art and narrative. Our survival depended on our ability to tell stories: to make sense of the world, to remember, to connect, to belong. Stories were not separate from life. They were life.

Narrative Arts Therapy (NAT) draws from this ancient tradition. It is a creative and scientifically grounded approach to healing, one that honours the way our brains are designed for narrative. Through writing, visual art, movement, and symbolic expression, NAT helps individuals reframe their personal stories. It transforms fear-based narratives into resilient ones, shame into self-compassion, pain into meaning. In doing so, it mirrors what our ancestors have always known: that stories, when told and witnessed, heal.

Why Stories Heal: The Brain’s Blueprint for Narrative

Our emotions, like, fear, joy, attachment, disgust, are not arbitrary. They are part of a biological blueprint, a survival mechanism that predates language. Long before we wrote our histories, we felt them. Our ancestors listened to these emotions, following them like signposts: fear warned them of danger, joy signified safety, and grief marked loss. These emotions shaped their choices, their communities, their myths. Over time, emotions and storytelling became inseparable.

Neuroscientists George Ellis and Mark Solms (2020) tell us that the brain, with its remarkable plasticity, is structured around, at least, nine primary emotional systems:

• Seeking – The drive to explore, learn, and make sense of the world.
• Disgust – The instinct to reject what is harmful.
• Rage – The response to injustice or violation.
• Fear – The alert system that ensures survival.
• Lust – The force of connection and continuity.
• Panic – The distress of separation and loss.
• Care – The instinct to nurture and protect.
• Play – The foundation of creativity and social learning.

Every story, personal or cultural, is built upon these emotional frameworks. NAT taps into this neural structure as a scaffold for healing. For instance:

• In re-constructing our narratives, the seeking system helps us construct meaningful personal narratives.
• Survivors of trauma often internalise disgust, turning it inward as shame. NAT engages the care and play systems to shift these feelings toward self-compassion and empowerment.
• By working creatively with these innate emotional pathways, NAT enables people to rewrite their stories – not by erasing anxiety, fear or pain, but by reshaping its meaning. We look for wise, philosophical stories.

How NAT Works

Narrative Arts Therapy is not about ignoring pain or replacing difficult emotions with forced positivity. It is about externalising, witnessing, and reshaping those emotions in ways that bring clarity and agency. Healing happens through:

• Storytelling & Writing – Translating emotions into words, allowing individuals to step back and reframe their experiences.
• Visual Art & Symbolism – Expressing feelings beyond the reach of language, creating new ways of seeing and understanding.
• Movement & Embodied Storytelling – Releasing trauma through physical expression, reconnecting with the wisdom of the body.
• Witnessing & Community Sharing – Being seen and heard, which rewires the brain’s relational pathways and fosters deep healing.

These practices tap into the neural foundations of human experience, guiding people from fragmentation to wholeness, from silence to self-authorship.

Rewriting Our Stories, Rewiring Our Minds

To heal through the narrative arts is to reclaim personal authorship. It is a process of reshaping the way we think, feel, and engage with the world. Our brains, designed for storytelling, respond to this process in profound ways. When we tell our stories—when we create art, dance our pain, shape symbols out of clay—we are not only expressing ourselves. We are rewiring our minds.

NAT provides a framework where healing is not only possible but inevitable. It acknowledges that while we cannot change what has happened to us, we can transform how those experiences live within us. And in that transformation, we find not just survival— but meaning, resilience, and renewal.

Key Texts

• Bolton, G. (2005). Reflective Practice: Writing and Professional Development. SAGE Publications.
• Caldwell, C., & Johnson, M. (2012). Body Stories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy. Contact Editions.
• Cozolino, L. (2014). The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Gone, J. P. (2013). "Redressing First Nations Historical Trauma: Theorizing Mechanisms for Indigenous Culture as Mental Health Treatment." Transcultural Psychiatry, 50(5), 683-706.
• Iseke, J. (2013). "Indigenous Storytelling as Research." International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(4), 559-577.
• Levine, S. K. (2018). The Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward a Therapeutic Aesthetics. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
• Magsamen, S., & Ross, I. (2023). Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. Random House.
• Malchiodi, C. A. (2007). The Art Therapy Sourcebook. McGraw-Hill.
• McNiff, S. (1992). Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination. Shambhala Publications.
• Payne, M. (2006). Narrative Therapy: An Introduction for Counsellors. SAGE Publications.
• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.
• White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Winberg, Marlene. Stories of War and Restitution: Curating the Narratives of !Xun Storyteller, Kapilolo Mahongo (1954-2018). PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2021.

Narrative Arts Therapy is an invitation – to rediscover the stories we carry, to give them form, to shape them anew. Because in the end, we are not just the stories we inherit. We are the stories we choose to tell.