Two Practitioners Founded The Approach In The 1980s
Narrative therapy was developed by social worker Michael White in Australia and family therapist David Epston in New Zealand during the 1980s. Their collaboration produced the 1990 book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, which formalized the method for clinical use worldwide.
The approach grew out of family therapy but rejected the idea that therapists are neutral experts diagnosing dysfunction. Instead, White and Epston treated people as the authors of their own lives, with therapists acting as curious collaborators rather than authorities on what a family's problem really means.
The Central Idea Is That People Are Not Problems
A core principle is that the person is never the problem; the problem is the problem. A family struggling with a child's anxiety, for instance, is encouraged to talk about anxiety as a separate force rather than treating the child as an anxious person.
This shift changes the emotional tone of family conversations. Parents who previously blamed a child's character can instead unite against the shared external problem, which often reduces shame and defensiveness and opens room for collaborative solutions within the household.
Externalizing Language Separates The Person From The Struggle
Externalizing conversations use language that gives the problem its own identity, often a name chosen by the family, such as 'the Worry' or 'the Anger.' This linguistic move makes the problem something a family can examine and resist together.
Therapists ask questions like how the problem recruits family members, what tricks it uses, and when it has less influence. These questions treat the problem as an external character with tactics, which children in particular find easier to discuss than personal blame.
Families Carry A Dominant Story About Who They Are
Every family accumulates a dominant narrative over time, a broad storyline about what kind of family they are, such as 'the family that always fights' or 'the family in crisis since the divorce.' This story shapes which events members notice and remember.
A dominant story is not necessarily false, but it is selective. It highlights certain events while filtering out others that do not fit, so a single difficult period can come to define a family's entire self-image for years.
Dominant Stories Can Overshadow Other True Events
Because dominant stories filter memory, families often forget moments that contradict the negative narrative, such as times they cooperated well or supported one another. Narrative therapists deliberately search for these overlooked moments during sessions.
Recovering forgotten evidence is not about forced positivity. It is about accuracy: if a family only remembers conflict, their story is incomplete, and an incomplete story limits what they believe is possible for their relationships going forward.
Re-Authoring Means Building A Fuller, More Accurate Story
Re-authoring is the process of weaving overlooked events into a richer, alternative story that sits alongside the problem-saturated one. It does not erase real difficulties but places them next to evidence of competence, care, and resilience.
A re-authored family story might acknowledge a painful divorce while also documenting how siblings supported each other through it. The goal is a story with enough texture that no single event defines the family permanently.
Therapists Look For Unique Outcomes That Contradict The Problem
A 'unique outcome' is any moment, however small, when the problem's expected pattern did not hold. If a family says anger always escalates at dinner, a single calm dinner becomes evidence worth investigating in depth.
Therapists ask detailed questions about these exceptions: what was different that day, who noticed it, and what it says about the family's abilities. Small unique outcomes often become the seeds of a new, more hopeful storyline.
Thin Description Versus Thick Description
Narrative therapists distinguish thin description, a flat label like 'a difficult teenager,' from thick description, a detailed account of context, history, and meaning. Thin descriptions tend to stick and calcify identity, while thick descriptions restore nuance.
Building a thick description involves asking about a person's values, skills, and intentions, not just their behavior. A teenager labeled 'difficult' might, under thick description, emerge as someone fiercely loyal to friends and struggling with an unaddressed learning difference.
Deconstruction Questions Where A Problem Story Came From
Deconstruction asks where a dominant story originated: whose voice first labeled the family this way, and what cultural or institutional assumptions fed into it. A school's label, a relative's comment, or a diagnosis can all shape a family's self-story.
By tracing a story's origin, families see it as one interpretation among many, not an objective fact about them. This distance makes room to ask whether the story still serves them or whether an alternative fits better.
Cultural And Social Context Shapes Family Narratives
Narrative therapy pays close attention to how gender expectations, class, migration history, and cultural norms feed into a family's dominant story. A story of a 'failing father,' for example, often reflects economic pressure and social judgment, not personal failure alone.
By naming these broader forces, families can separate what is truly personal from what is imposed by circumstance or societal expectation. This distinction reduces individual blame and often reveals shared external pressures the whole family is navigating together.
The Therapist's Stance Is Curious, Not Expert
White described the ideal narrative therapist stance as 'decentered but influential.' The therapist actively shapes the conversation through questions but avoids positioning themselves as the authority who knows what the family's story should be.
This stance matters in family sessions because it prevents any one member from feeling diagnosed or judged by an outsider. Instead, everyone, including children, is treated as a knowledgeable narrator of their own experience.
Mapping The Effects Of The Problem On The Family
A common technique is mapping the problem's influence: how it affects each family member's mood, relationships, work, and self-image. This map often reveals that a problem assumed to belong to one person is actually shaping the whole household.
For example, a child's school refusal might be mapped to show its ripple effects on a parent's job stress, a sibling's resentment, and grandparents' worry. Seeing the full map helps the family target the shared problem more precisely.
Naming The Problem Gives It A Shape
Choosing a name for the problem, ideally one the family generates itself, transforms an abstract struggle into something concrete enough to discuss. Children especially respond well to naming, sometimes drawing the problem as a character.
A name like 'the Grump' or 'the Meltdown Monster' gives siblings and parents shared vocabulary. Instead of arguing about who is at fault, the family can ask together how to reduce the named problem's power over their days.
Children Can Externalize Problems Through Characters
Because young children think concretely, narrative therapists often use drawing, puppets, or storytelling to externalize a problem visually. A child might draw 'Worry' as a small creature that gets bigger or smaller depending on what happens during the day.
This visual externalization gives children language for feelings they cannot yet articulate directly. Parents present in the session also gain insight into a child's inner experience without the child having to explain it in adult terms.
Letters And Certificates Document Progress
Epston pioneered writing therapeutic letters to families after sessions, summarizing insights and unique outcomes in the family's own words. These letters serve as a lasting record the family can reread when the problem story tries to reassert itself.
Some therapists issue certificates marking milestones, such as a child's 'graduation' from a fear or a family's successful stand against conflict. These documents formalize progress in a way a single conversation cannot, giving families tangible proof of change.
Definitional Ceremonies Bring In Outside Witnesses
A definitional ceremony invites an audience, sometimes other families or community members, to witness a family retell its story. The audience listens without interrupting and later reflects back what struck them, without offering advice or judgment.
This structured witnessing validates a family's new story beyond the therapy room. Hearing outsiders acknowledge their resilience often carries more weight than hearing it from a therapist alone, since it signals the story holds up in the wider world.
Outsider Witnesses Reflect Back What They Heard
Trained outsider witnesses follow a specific structure: they describe what expression or story stood out, what image it evoked, why it resonated personally, and how listening moved them. They never interpret or advise the family directly.
This disciplined reflection avoids turning the ceremony into unsolicited feedback. The family retains full authorship of their story while gaining the reassurance that their experience genuinely connected with and mattered to other people.
Re-Membering Conversations Revisit Who Belongs In A Life Story
Re-membering conversations, a term coined by anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff and adopted by narrative therapists, explore which people, living or deceased, a family chooses to keep as significant contributors to their identity and values.
A family grieving a grandparent, for instance, might discuss how that person's values still guide daily decisions. This process treats identity as a club with members the family actively chooses, rather than a fixed set determined only by biology.
Narrative Therapy Differs From Traditional Family Systems Therapy
Classic family systems therapy often maps recurring interaction patterns and roles within a family, such as a scapegoated child or an overinvolved parent, and works to change those patterns directly through structural interventions.
Narrative therapy instead focuses on the stories a family tells about those patterns and how language sustains them. Both approaches address family dynamics, but narrative therapy treats storytelling itself as the primary lever for change.
It Also Differs From Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy typically targets an individual's distorted thoughts and teaches skills to correct them, often through structured homework and measurable behavioral goals set by a treatment plan agreed with the therapist.
Narrative therapy is less structured and more collaborative about goals, treating the family's own language and values as the starting point rather than a standardized thought-correction framework. The two approaches are sometimes combined in practice.
The Approach Is Used With Grief And Loss
Families processing the death of a member often use narrative therapy to keep that person present in an evolving story rather than erasing them from family life, aligning closely with re-membering conversations described earlier.
This use of narrative therapy resists the common assumption that healthy grieving means letting go entirely. Instead, families are supported in finding a continuing, meaningful place for the deceased within their ongoing family story.
It Is Also Used With Chronic Illness In Families
When one member has a chronic illness, families can fall into a dominant story where the illness defines every interaction. Narrative therapy helps separate the person from the diagnosis and highlight capabilities the illness has not erased.
Externalizing the illness itself, sometimes literally naming it, allows family members to discuss frustration and fatigue as directed at the illness rather than at each other, which can ease tension between caregivers and the person who is unwell.
Migration And Displacement Are Common Contexts
Migrant and refugee families often carry dominant stories shaped by loss of home, status, or language fluency. Narrative therapy has been widely adapted in these contexts to help families reconnect with pre-migration identities and skills.
Therapists working with displaced families frequently use re-membering practices to honor ancestors, homeland traditions, and community ties left behind, helping the family build a story that bridges past and present rather than treating migration as total rupture.
LGBTQ+ Families Have Found The Approach Useful
Narrative therapy's attention to how dominant social narratives shape identity has made it a common choice for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, who often confront stories imposed by wider society rather than chosen by themselves.
Family sessions in this context can help parents and children rebuild a shared story that honors both a family's cultural or religious values and a member's identity, rather than treating the two as necessarily in permanent conflict.
Indigenous Communities Have Shaped Related Practices
White and Epston credited Indigenous storytelling traditions in Australia and New Zealand as an influence on narrative therapy's collective, community-oriented practices, including definitional ceremonies and the value placed on collective witnessing.
Some Indigenous practitioners have since adapted narrative therapy further, integrating it with community and land-based healing practices, arguing that the approach's respect for local knowledge fits more naturally with Indigenous worldviews than individually focused Western therapies.
A Typical Family Session Follows A Loose Structure
Sessions usually open by inviting the family to describe the problem in their own words, move into externalizing and mapping its effects, then search for unique outcomes before closing with a re-authored summary the family helps write.
There is no fixed script, and sessions can vary widely in length and pace depending on family size and the ages of children involved. Flexibility is considered a strength rather than a lack of rigor.
Training And Credentialing Vary By Country
Narrative therapy is taught through dedicated institutes, notably the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide founded by Michael White, as well as university family therapy programs. Credentialing requirements differ widely between countries and licensing bodies.
Many practitioners are trained family therapists, social workers, or counselors who add narrative methods to an existing license rather than practicing narrative therapy as a separate, independently regulated profession.
Evidence Supports Some Outcomes, Though Research Is Still Growing
Studies on narrative therapy report benefits for conditions including childhood anxiety, family conflict, and grief, though the research base is smaller than for cognitive behavioral therapy, partly because narrative methods are harder to standardize for controlled trials.
Reviews generally describe outcomes as promising, particularly for engagement and satisfaction, while calling for more randomized studies to establish narrative therapy's effectiveness with the same rigor applied to more established treatments.
Critics Point To Limits Of The Approach
Some clinicians argue narrative therapy's flexible, unstructured format makes it harder to teach consistently and harder to measure in outcome research compared to manualized therapies with fixed session counts and defined techniques.
Others note it may be less suited to crises requiring immediate safety intervention, such as active abuse or acute suicide risk, where structured, directive approaches are usually considered more appropriate as a first response.
Telehealth Has Expanded Access To Narrative Therapy
Video-based sessions have made narrative therapy more accessible to rural families and those without local specialists, since the conversational, low-equipment nature of the method translates reasonably well to remote formats compared to therapies requiring in-person materials.
Some techniques, like externalizing drawings or letter writing, adapt easily to shared screens and digital documents, letting families keep therapeutic letters and certificates in accessible digital form for future reference.
Schools And Community Programs Use Adapted Versions
Beyond clinical settings, some schools and community organizations use simplified narrative techniques, such as externalizing language and strengths-based storytelling, in group work with families facing shared challenges like bullying or neighborhood violence.
These adapted programs are generally led by trained counselors or social workers rather than licensed therapists, and they focus on building collective community narratives rather than delivering individual family therapy.
The Legacy Continues Through Training Institutes Worldwide
After Michael White's death in 2008, narrative therapy continued expanding through institutes on multiple continents, including the Dulwich Centre in Australia and affiliated training centers in North America, Europe, and Asia.
These institutes publish case studies, host international conferences, and continue developing narrative practices for new contexts, keeping the approach evolving well beyond its original family therapy roots into schools, medicine, and community work.
Sources
- GoodTherapy: Narrative Therapy β overview of history, techniques, and founders
- Verywell Mind: Narrative Therapy β techniques, uses, and effectiveness
- Dulwich Centre: What is Narrative Therapy? β from the institute Michael White founded
FAQ
Who created narrative therapy?
Michael White, an Australian social worker, and David Epston, a New Zealand family therapist, developed narrative therapy together during the 1980s.
What does externalizing the problem mean?
It means talking about a problem, such as anxiety or anger, as a separate force acting on the family rather than as a trait belonging to any one person.
Is narrative therapy only used with families?
No. It is also used with individuals, couples, groups, and communities, though family application is one of its most common and well-documented uses.
What is a unique outcome in narrative therapy?
A unique outcome is any moment when a family's usual problem pattern did not occur, which therapists explore as evidence of alternative possibilities.
How is narrative therapy different from just talking about problems?
It uses specific techniques, such as externalizing language, mapping influence, and re-authoring, to deliberately restructure how a family understands and discusses its story.
Can children participate in narrative family therapy?
Yes. Therapists often adapt techniques for children using drawing, puppets, or characters so young children can externalize problems in age-appropriate ways.
What is a definitional ceremony?
It is a structured event where a family retells its story to an audience of witnesses, who later reflect on what they heard without giving advice.
Does narrative therapy have scientific evidence behind it?
Some studies show benefits for anxiety, family conflict, and grief, but the overall research base is smaller than for more established therapies like CBT.
Is narrative therapy suitable for a family in crisis?
For immediate safety risks such as abuse or acute suicide risk, structured crisis intervention usually comes first; narrative methods are typically used once safety is established.
What is re-authoring?
Re-authoring is the process of building a fuller family story that includes overlooked strengths and events alongside acknowledged difficulties.
Who trains narrative therapists?
Institutes such as the Dulwich Centre in Australia, along with university family therapy programs worldwide, offer narrative therapy training.
What does re-membering mean in this context?
It refers to conversations exploring which people, living or deceased, a family chooses to keep as meaningful contributors to its identity.
Can narrative therapy be combined with other approaches?
Yes, many clinicians blend narrative techniques with cognitive behavioral therapy or family systems approaches depending on a family's needs.
Is narrative therapy used outside clinical settings?
Yes, simplified versions appear in some schools and community programs addressing shared challenges like bullying, usually led by trained counselors.
How long does narrative family therapy usually take?
There is no fixed length; session count and pacing vary widely depending on the family's needs, size, and the ages of children involved.
About the Author
We reference Wikipedia and other authoritative sources to explain the background and current understanding of this topic.
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