Weaving a Self Story: How Cultural Narratives Meet and Affect Psychotherapy with Polycultural Persons

The nascent field of cultural psychology is rich with deconstructive elements and helpful perspectives, but it thus far has not produced many helpful clinical applications, particularly with how to conceptualize and treat polycultural persons in a tradition-sensitive way. The thesis of this case analysis is that working with clients out of a cultural psychology framework can be accomplished by working with the client's personal, familial, and cultural narratives. This means helping clients to order and build the histories that impact them in order to aid their construction a coherent self story. In the case of a polycultural individual, such a narrative analysis involves understanding how narrative themes from different sources (i.e., cultures) combine and affects the narrative identity of the individual. Therefore, treatment of individuals in this paradigm involves the co-construction of the client's self story by using as source material the perspectives of the narratives that meet in them.