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Narrative Therapy
A collaborative therapeutic approach that separates people from their problems, uncovering strengths and creating new narratives that support growth and healing.
Introduction
The basics
What is Narrative Therapy?
If your life story became a book or movie, what might the title be? And if you were the director, what scenes would make the “cut” (and why)? Narrative Therapy centers on the power of personal stories to shape your identity and how you experience life.
In Narrative Therapy, you may learn to identify common narratives, gaining insight and a sense of agency over certain problems. This approach is often appealing to people willing to explore their past and present as an “author,” empowering them with tools to:
- Externalize and manage challenges
- Liberate themselves from blame
- Create a more positive future
Goal
What is the goal of Narrative Therapy?
In addition to addressing specific symptoms, a goal of Narrative Therapy may be to encourage you to better understand how key problems, actions, and perspectives are impacting your life.
It facilitates a non-judgmental process of reflection, strengthens identity, contextualizes themes and responses, and identifies core “schemas” that emerged during development. Instead of feeling stuck in old patterns or limiting beliefs, in Narrative Therapy, you can learn to re-author a story in a more enriching way, focusing on strengths, skills, and resilience through life’s ups and downs.
Uses
What conditions does Narrative Therapy treat?
People with all types of experiences seek Narrative Therapy for a wide variety of problems, including:
- ADHD
- Anxiety symptoms
- Attachment injuries
- Bullying
- Depression
- Eating disorders
- Grief
- PTSD
- Relationship issues
Narrative Therapy is versatile and can be used with people across cultures, socio-economic classes, abilities, ages, and may help people with certain injuries and developmental challenges.
Subtypes
What are the subtypes of Narrative Therapy?
There are several subtypes of Narrative Therapy. For example:
Narrative Therapy with an Emotional Approach (NTEA)
- Designed to help individuals, particularly those with depression, “re-author” their life stories by focusing on positive instead of negative stories
Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) and Adaptations
- A short-term, trauma-focused therapy primarily used to treat PTSD and trauma-related disorders. It helps clients construct a chronological life narrative, making sense of traumatic events and restoring a sense of self-worth.
- Key techniques include: Lifeline mapping with symbols (e.g., stones for traumatic events, flowers for positive moments) to visually organize memories.
Tree of Life Therapy (Narrative Metaphor Approach)
- Uses the tree metaphor: roots represent past, trunk present, and branches future. Clients visualize their strengths, values, and aspirations, building resilience through storytelling.
Narrative Therapy can also be used with children, teens, groups, veterans, and survivors of natural disasters. It can be used in school settings, in marriage and family therapy settings, and in specific post-trauma support settings, among others.
Effectiveness
Origins
Who developed Narrative Therapy and when?
Amid the 1980s postmodern and constructivist movement, Narrative Therapy was developed by Australian therapist Michael White and New Zealand therapist David Epston.
In 1983, they co-founded the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, which became the hub for training and publishing in this approach, most notably through their 1990 book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. Some of the ideas were inspired by the French theorist Michel Foucault, whose work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and discourse influenced their belief that people’s lives are shaped by the stories they and others tell about them.
An initial goal was to create a therapeutic model that challenged social constructs, using a non-blaming and non-pathological approach. This perspective positions clients as the experts of their own lives and focuses on separating the person from the problem. Over time, it has grown into a globally practiced method applied in individual, couple, family, and community contexts.
Evidence Base
Is Narrative Therapy evidence based?
Narrative Therapy is considered an evidence-based therapy. In many cases, clients rate Narrative Therapy positively and report positive outcomes. At least one study found it helpful for children in building more positive social skills, while many studies highlight the positive impact of Narrative Therapy among adults with depression.
Other studies continue to explore the efficacy of Narrative Therapy in treating concerns like bullying, chronic pain, PTSD, relationship issues, marital satisfaction, and peak performance goals.
How it works
Techniques Used
How does Narrative Therapy work?
Narrative Therapy taps into an innate human tendency toward storytelling and metaphor. Narrative therapists believe a primary mechanism for healing is through personal meaning-making. There is less of a focus on the feedback loop between the client and therapist, and more of a focus on your willingness to explore your internal world.
Narrative Therapy involves a number of key principles:
- Stories shape our realities.
- We have different realities (there is no “objective reality”).
- Reality is socially constructed and influenced by communication.
- A narrative can help us understand our reality.
- People are separate from problems.
- We have the power to “re-author” many aspects of our lives.
- We can learn to catch innovative or “sparkling moments”.
- Through this process, we can illuminate key values, beliefs, and themes like autonomy, connection, resilience, and joy.
Narrative Therapy works by affirming and empowering your ability to tell your story in a way that helps you reach your therapeutic goals.
What to expect in a session
What can I expect from sessions in Narrative Therapy?
Narrative Therapy often includes:
- Building rapport and identifying key issues through open-ended questions
- Exploring personal stories: You may be encouraged to write or draw out a narrative timeline or a specific story from your life
- Focusing beyond diagnosis: While mental health issues may be explored, a narrative therapist won’t try to fit all of your problems into a single diagnosis
- Honoring autonomy: Therapists typically avoid referring to you as a “patient,” instead using terms like client, author, or, in group settings, community member
Throughout the process of Narrative Therapy:
- The therapist’s role is not to lead your story but to help you explore and shape it.
- You are viewed as the expert in your own life
- The therapist facilitates a process of discovery to support your unique goals
Treatment length & structure
How long does Narrative Therapy typically take? Is there any set structure?
While each Narrative Therapy treatment plan is unique, recent research has found that many clients see benefits within 15-20 sessions on average, reporting significant moments of recovery and change.
In many cases, acute issues (such as a trauma response to a car accident or other event) may resolve more quickly, while chronic problems and complex traumas may take longer to resolve. Some people find benefit with just a few sessions, focusing on a specific problem or goal.
The overarching structure of Narrative Therapy is to:
- Identify key stories
- Externalize a problem and map its effects
- Explore the view you have of yourself and others
- Create space to notice preferred actions and intentions.
Getting care
Finding a therapist
How do I find a therapist who uses Narrative Therapy?
Alma’s directory has many therapists who specialize in Narrative Therapy, including:
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Similar types of therapy
Besides Narrative Therapy, what other types of therapy might be right for me?
If after reading this, you’re not sure if Narrative Therapy is quite the right fit, here are some other types that might be worth looking into:
Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT): if culture and lived context matter
Culturally informed therapy centers identity, lived experience, context, and power dynamics as part of understanding mental health and healing.
Solution-Focused Therapy: if you want a future-oriented approach
Solution-focused therapy emphasizes strengths, exceptions, and small next steps rather than spending most of the work analyzing problems.
Internal Family Systems (IFS): if inner conflict feels familiar
IFS helps people understand inner “parts” with curiosity and compassion, with the goal of strengthening a grounded, compassionate self-leadership.
Psychoanalysis: if deeper long-term insight feels useful
Psychoanalysis explores unconscious patterns, early experiences, and recurring conflicts through deep, long-term self-exploration.
This article was written and medically validated by Teresa F. Jansen, LPC, NCC.
FAQs
Narrative therapy is often a good fit for people who are drawn to reflection and meaning-making — who want to understand not just what happened to them but how they've come to define themselves in relation to it. It's also appealing to those who feel that therapy has pathologized or reduced their experience in the past, because narrative therapy explicitly positions you as the expert on your own life rather than a patient with symptoms to be diagnosed. It can be particularly helpful for depression, anxiety, trauma, relationship difficulties, and identity exploration, and it tends to resonate with people from diverse cultural backgrounds because it actively questions the assumptions embedded in dominant cultural narratives.
Yes. This type of therapy is effectively delivered online using secure video platforms. Research on online care consistently shows that results are comparable to in-person care across most approaches and conditions. If you're looking for this type of therapy online, you can use this link to find a therapist who specializes in narrative therapy and takes your insurance.
Whether narrative therapy is covered depends on your individual insurance plan. Most major insurance plans cover therapy when it's provided by a licensed mental health professional, regardless of the type of therapy you choose. What matters more is whether therapy is considered medically necessary given your diagnosis. The best way to find out what you'll pay is to check your plan's explanation of benefits, call the member services number on your insurance card, or use Alma's free cost estimator tool before booking.
Both narrative therapy and SFBT are humanistic, client-centered approaches that avoid pathologizing — but they orient differently. SFBT is explicitly brief and forward-looking, focusing on solutions and preferred futures rather than exploring problems in depth. Narrative therapy is more exploratory: it's interested in understanding how the stories you tell about yourself were constructed, what or who influenced them, and how they might be re-authored. SFBT asks "what's working and how do we build on it?" Narrative therapy asks "what story have you been living, and is it the one you would choose?" Both can be effective, and a therapist may draw on both depending on your needs.
Yes. Narrative therapy was built around the idea that how we narrate our experiences shapes how we understand ourselves — and that these narratives are not fixed truths but constructed stories, often heavily influenced by others. When those stories are saturated with failure, inadequacy, or shame, narrative therapy offers a way to identify where those stories came from, notice the moments that contradict them ("sparkling moments"), and begin to build an alternative story that better reflects your actual strengths, values, and intentions. This process can be profoundly clarifying for people struggling with self-esteem or questions about identity.
In narrative therapy, "rewriting your story" refers to the practice of constructing an alternative narrative about yourself — one that's equally true to your experience but organized around your strengths, values, and resilience rather than your problems. This doesn't mean denying difficulty or creating a false account. It means recognizing that the story you've been telling about yourself (often internalized from others, or from painful experiences) is one version of many possible versions. A narrative therapist helps you find the evidence in your own history for a different, more empowering account — and then supports you in living more fully from that account.
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