ModalityJune 2026
Post 7 of 8
Narrative Therapy: What If the Story You’re Telling About Yourself Is the Problem — Not You?
Narrative therapy challenges the idea that your problems are who you are. Here’s how separating the story from the self can change everything.
Most people who come to therapy have absorbed a story about themselves — “I’m the anxious one,” “I’m bad at relationships,” “I always self-sabotage,” “I’m too much.” These narratives feel like facts. They feel like truth. But narrative therapy asks a deceptively powerful question: who authored that story? And does it actually reflect who you are — or does it reflect what other people needed you to believe, what a difficult period taught you, or what a particular social or cultural context reinforced?
The Core Idea: The Person Is Not the Problem
Narrative therapy was developed in the 1980s by Australian therapists Michael White and David Epston. The central premise — “the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem” — is one of the most liberating ideas in modern therapy. It externalizes problems rather than treating them as intrinsic identity traits. Instead of “I am depressed,” narrative therapy works with “I have a relationship with depression.” Instead of “I am a failure,” it explores “what is the story of failure, and where did it come from?”
This isn’t semantic games. The shift in language corresponds to a real shift in agency. When a problem is part of your identity, you can’t step outside it. When it’s something you have a relationship with, you can examine that relationship and decide whether you want to change it.
Dominant Stories vs. Alternative Stories
Narrative therapy operates on the idea that we are the authors of multiple potential stories about ourselves — but some of them get amplified and others get minimized, often by forces outside us (family expectations, cultural norms, trauma, social systems). The goal of narrative work is to surface the “alternative stories” — the evidence that doesn’t fit the problem-saturated narrative — and to thicken those alternative accounts into something robust enough to live from.
This involves a lot of careful, curious questioning. A narrative therapist will ask about exceptions: “Has there been a time when the depression didn’t have as much of a grip on you? What was different then?” “What does that tell you about yourself that the dominant story might be leaving out?” These aren’t rhetorical questions — they’re excavation.
Narrative Therapy Is Particularly Powerful For…
- People who have deeply internalized a negative identity story — often from childhood, trauma, or long-term difficult relationships
- People navigating cultural, generational, or systemic pressures that shaped how they see themselves
- LGBTQ+ clients who have absorbed dominant social narratives about their identities
- People in recovery from any kind of abuse, where the abuser’s story about them has been internalized
- Anyone who feels stuck in a fixed self-concept and wants to develop a more fluid, expansive sense of who they are
How I Use Narrative Therapy
I integrate narrative approaches into my work in a variety of ways — often in combination with IFS (where the “parts” of you that hold problem-saturated stories can be worked with directly) and somatic tools (because the body often holds these stories just as much as the mind does). Narrative therapy is especially well-suited to clients who are reflective, linguistically oriented, and curious about the “why” behind their patterns. It’s also a natural fit for identity work of any kind.
“Rewriting the stories that no longer serve you. Not by pretending the hard things didn’t happen — but by refusing to let them be the only story that counts.”
Your story isn’t fixed. Let’s write a more honest one. Book a free call to explore whether narrative therapy makes sense for you.
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