Narrative Therapy Online

What Is Narrative Therapy?

Narrative therapy was developed by Michael White and David Epston in the 1980s. It starts from the idea that people make sense of their lives through stories, and that some stories, often shaped by other people or by hard experiences, leave out much of who a person is. A phrase often used to sum it up: “the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem”.

Its main ideas:

• Externalising: talking about a problem as separate from you, such as “the anxiety” rather than “my anxious nature”.
• Mapping effects: tracing how the problem affects your life and relationships.
• Unique outcomes: noticing times when the problem did not win, which point to other stories.
• Values: finding what matters to you, which the problem story tends to hide.

How It Is Used in Sessions

Narrative ideas are used throughout counselling. In trauma work, they help separate who you are from what happened to you. With depression, they are used to question stories of failure, and with couples, to face a shared problem together. Narrative therapy combines well with somatic work and parts work.

What’s the Difference between CBT and Narrative Therapy?

Both look at how you make sense of events, but in different ways. CBT focuses on specific thoughts and behaviours, tests them against evidence and builds practical skills, usually in a structured, time-limited format. Narrative therapy looks at the larger stories you live by and the culture around them, and treats you as the expert on your own life. Sessions draw on both.

What the Evidence Shows

The evidence is limited. A study of 47 adults with depression found large improvements after eight sessions of narrative therapy, but it had no comparison group (Vromans and Schweitzer, 2011). A 2024 review of 54 trials in people with physical illnesses, 52 of them from China, found that narrative therapy reduced depressive symptoms, but rated the certainty of the evidence as low or very low (Hu and colleagues, 2024).