Narrative Therapy: Rewriting the Stories That Define You

Separating identity from problem, finding exceptions, and authoring a new story

How does narrative therapy help people change the stories they tell about themselves?

Narrative therapy, developed by Michael White and David Epston, holds that people live by stories — about who they are, what they’re capable of, and what their experiences mean. By separating the person from the problem ("the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem") and finding "unique outcomes" that contradict a limiting story, therapy opens space to author a more empowering alternative. The evidence base is growing but smaller and less methodologically uniform than CBT.

Narrative therapy emerged in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s through the work of Michael White and David Epston. Its core insight is that we are not our problems — we are the authors of stories about our problems, and those stories can be revised. Where cognitive approaches target the content of thoughts, narrative therapy targets the story structure: which events get selected, which get ignored, and what conclusion about the self those events are made to support. The practices below are the core narrative moves, with honest evidence grading.