TY - JOUR T1 - Dear Reader — a letter about stories, and vice versa JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 718 LP - 719 VL - 55 IS - 518 AU - Tim Caroe Y1 - 2005/09/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/55/518/718.abstract N2 - Dear Reader,My name is Tim Caroe and I work as a GP. In my job, I often meet people who are struggling with things in their lives, and 2 years ago I began to feel dissatisfied with what I was able to bring to their distress, so I started investigating different types of therapy. I was most attracted by narrative therapy, a type of therapy used for many years by family therapists. This led me down a new avenue in my consultations, one which has led to me writing to you today.In this letter, I'm going to tell you a bit about the theory of narrative, and then how I have used it in my consultations to date. As you read, I'm sure that my letter will stir up ideas of your own and it would be good if you could add these thoughts to my own, because I believe that something new can emerge through the meeting of ideas. That's the kind of thing that I hope happens when I write letters to people I meet in my job, people who are often called ‘patients’.So what is a narrative? It is much more than just a story. It is a created thread that links events in our lives and puts them into a context — it gives them a certain meaning. As such it tells us who we are, and where we are going. One philosopher wrote: ‘Making sense of my present action … requires a narrative understanding of my life, a sense of what I have become which can only be given in a story … We grasp our lives in a narrative.’1In this setting, the stories we tell about ourselves create for us the reality that we experience, not the other way … ER -