Abstract
Narrative therapy, positioned within postmodern theory, puts its primary focus on re-telling clients’ experiences.
The concept of “de-centred and influential” is used in how the therapist is involved in this therapeutic conversation.
This concept places the client at the centre of conversation, with the therapist exerting influence in its process. This
practice represents how it will contribute to the ideas of postmodern psychotherapy. However, this leaves much
room for further exploration in terms of its implementation, and this study aims to describe how to embody this “de-centred and influential” stance of the therapist in practice. The author carried out the analysis in the following way:
twenty narrative-based conversations between the clients and the therapist were first collected and transcribed. The
utterances of the clients and the therapist were then analyzed using a qualitative categorical analysis to categorize
the therapist’s utterances in micro-forms, together with those of the clients. In this way, the results would depict
some aspects of the therapist’s attempt to practise “de-centring and influencing” stance through using diverse types
of response to the clients, as well as introducing meta-level utterances of thematization and evaluation. The analysis
also describes the ways in which the clients contribute to generating such conversations in a variety of ways through
responding to the therapist’s attempts.
