Narrative Arts Therapy

What is Narrative Arts Therapy?

The Story We Live

Humans are born storytellers. Long before there was written language, we painted on cave walls, sang around fires, and shaped figures from clay — expressing the mysteries of life through art and story.

Our survival depended on it. Storytelling helped us make sense of the world, remember what mattered, connect with others, and find our place in something larger than ourselves. Story wasn't separate from life. Story was life.

Narrative Arts Therapy (NAT) draws from this deep ancestral well. It is a creative and scientifically grounded approach to healing — one that honours how our brains are wired for narrative. Through writing, visual art, movement, and symbolic expression, NAT helps people reframe their life stories. It supports the transformation of fear into courage, shame into self-compassion, pain into meaning. In doing so, it mirrors and illuminates what our ancestors knew: Stories heal — especially when they are witnessed.

Why Stories Heal: The Brain’s Blueprint for Narrative

Emotions like fear, joy, attachment, and grief are not random. They are part of an ancient biological design — a survival system that predates language.

Before we told stories with words, we told them with feelings. Our ancestors followed emotions as signposts: fear warned of danger, joy meant safety, grief marked loss. These feelings shaped choices, kinship, and myth. Over time, emotion and narrative became inseparable.

Today, neuroscience helps us understand why. Scientists like George Ellis and Mark Solms (2020) have identified at least nine primary emotional systems embedded in the brain’s architecture:

• Seeking – the drive to explore, learn, and find meaning
• Disgust – the instinct to reject what is harmful
• Rage – the reaction to injustice or threat
• Fear – the internal alarm for survival
• Lust – the drive toward intimacy and continuity
• Panic/Grief – the distress of separation and loss
• Care – the impulse to nurture and protect
• Play – the foundation of creativity and learning

These systems form the emotional scaffolding of all stories — personal, collective, and mythic. Narrative Arts Therapy works directly with this structure.

For example:

• The seeking system helps us reframe the meaning of past experiences and create new direction.
• Survivors of trauma often internalise disgust, turning it inward as shame. NAT activates care and play to transform this shame into self-worth.
• Fear and rage are honoured and expressed through symbolic art or movement — not erased, but reshaped.

When we engage creatively with our emotional stories, we’re not bypassing difficulty — we’re meeting it with tools that the body and brain understand.

How NAT Works

Narrative Arts Therapy is not about silencing discomfort or pain, or replacing it with forced positivity. It’s about giving pain a shape, a colour, a sound — and then stepping back to see, and understand it differently.

Healing begins when we externalise and witness our inner world. NAT supports this through:

• Storytelling & Writing — Giving language to emotions, allowing people to reframe their life narratives
• Visual Art & Symbolism — Expressing what words can’t hold, creating new ways of understanding
• Movement & Embodied Storytelling — Releasing trauma stored in the body, reconnecting with physical wisdom
• Witnessing & Sharing in Community — Being truly seen and heard rewires the brain’s relational pathways

These practices engage the full sensory and emotional system of the brain, moving us from fragmentation to coherence, from silence to self-authorship.

Rewriting Our Stories, Rewiring Our Minds

To heal through the narrative arts is to reclaim your voice — to become the author of your own life story.

The brain responds to this in powerful ways. Each time we tell a story, create an image, dance a memory, or shape a symbol from clay, we are engaging in neural re-patterning.

We are not ony expressing ourselves — we are rewiring ourselves.

NAT offers a pathway where healing becomes not only possible, but deeply organic.We cannot change the past. But we can change how it lives inside us.And in that transformation, we discover not just survival, but meaning, resilience, and renewal.

Selected Key Texts that inform and enrich the foundation of Narrative Arts Therapy:

• 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.
• Ellis, G., & Solms, M. (2020). Beyond Evolutionary Psychology: How and Why Neuropsychological Systems Explain Human Behavior. Cambridge University Press.
• 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, M. (2021). Stories of War and Restitution: Curating the Narratives of !Xun Storyteller, Kapilolo Mahongo (1954–2018). PhD diss., University of Cape Town.