Narrative Therapy was developed by Michael White and David Epston in the 1980s and is unique in that clients learn to separate their problems and unwanted behaviors from themselves. The distance created between them and their concerns can open the door to new perspectives, allowing them to gain insights into the protective nature of their concerns.
Narrative therapy is an effective treatment option for a range of mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, trauma, substance use disorders, and anger difficulties. It can also be impactful with clients who struggle with emotion regulation. With this approach, experiences and events in a person’s life are viewed as stories, which stand out more than others. These stories can stem from trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and other events that shaped their identity.
This is a collaborative therapy, meaning that clients are viewed as the experts of their experiences and stories. Clinicians can help clients see how their goals, values, and other characteristics that define them are separate from their challenges and problems. This can include helping clients shift the way that they speak about their mental health, such as “I am experiencing anxiety” rather than “I am anxious.” Because narrative therapy does not focus on diagnoses, sessions focus on the dominant stories clients experience and on finding alternative stories that showcase their strengths and resilience.
For more valuable resources, view our Narrative Therapy Tools and Resources hub
12 Narrative Therapy Techniques
Narrative therapy techniques differ from other therapies because they are fluid therapies guided by a set framework. This includes externalizing the problem, exploring its impact, and finding new stories. Techniques incorporated into treatment are determined by a range of factors, including your clients’ symptoms, cultural background, goals, and their readiness for change. Some of these techniques are soft and may be used in a conversation, whereas others are more pronounced in sessions.
1) Externalizing Conversations
Externalizing conversations are a key component of narrative therapy, and are often the first technique used in sessions.
What It Is: Helping clients externalize their struggles focuses on how they express their difficulties. By separating their challenges or problems from themselves, they can see them as external rather than as components of their identity. As an example, you may help your client shift from saying “I am depressed” to something like “Depression has been affecting me lately.”
How It Helps Clients: Learning to externalize their problems can help reduce shame and fusion between their identity and symptoms. This shift enables new perspectives and opportunities to focus on problem-solving. It can also soften some of the defensiveness that clients experience.
How To Do It: As you listen to your client talk about their mental health, listen for statements that could be adjusted. You can gently encourage the use of externalizing language, ask personifying questions about its methods and effects. Consistency is important and should be noticeable in all sessions.
2) Problem Mapping
Mapping the problem’s influence can help clients assess its extent.
What It Is: Problem mapping can help explore how problems affect different areas of your client’s life, such as their work, relationships, health, decision-making, and self-image.
How It Helps Clients: Mapping can help increase your clients’ awareness of patterns and highlight the outcomes of maintaining their dominant story. This can help boost motivation for change by being specific about potential outcomes and challenges.
How To Do It: You can use specific questions about the frequency, intensity, and duration of their problem. This can be used as a visualization exercise, allowing clients to see the reach of their problems, including others in their lives.
3) Mapping your Client’s Influence on the Problem
Mapping the client’s influence on the problem differs from the previous technique because it shifts the focus to the client’s resistance.
What It Is: This narrative therapy technique is used to identify instances in which your client has challenged or resisted the influence of their problems.
How It Helps Clients: This version of a mapping exercise can help counter hopelessness and build self-efficacy. Clients can increase awareness of their internal resources, boosting their confidence about reaching their goals.
How To Do It: Focus on how your client’s actions or thoughts helped them respond to their problem in an effective way. This can include questions like, “Can you tell me about a time when depression didn’t overwhelm you?” Highlight their strengths and other qualities that enabled this resistance.
4) Re-Authoring
Re-authoring conversations is a narrative therapy technique that helps clients expand their preferred identity stories into full narratives.
What It Is: This is a collaborative process that helps clients create a storyline that aligns with their values by linking outcomes together.
How It Helps Clients: This technique goes beyond symptom relief by promoting identity reconstruction. This promotes long-term change, reshaping meaning, and helps clients see themselves as capable individuals.
How To Do It: Begin by helping your client find patterns of strength and trace the roots of these qualities. You can then link them to future goals while incorporating deeper questions.
5) Outcome Exploration
Outcome exploration is a narrative therapy technique that helps clients find cracks within their primary problem story.
What It Is: This technique is used to find moments or experiences that contradict beliefs that their problem is powerful or continual.
How It Helps Clients: Outcome exploration can challenge maladaptive thought patterns, specifically all-or-nothing thinking. This can increase cognitive flexibility and help clients rewrite conversations.
How To Do It: You can begin by asking your client specific questions to identify exceptions. This should take time, as it involves exploring the context, internal dialogue, actions, and other details.
6) Deconstructive Questioning
This narrative therapy technique focuses on examining socially constructed beliefs that shape one’s identity.
What It Is: This is a questioning process that helps clients analyze where their beliefs originated and how they were reinforced by cultural narratives.
How It Helps Clients: Deconstructive questioning can help reduce shame and loosen rigid identity components. Clients can gain insight into how societal pressures impact their identity.
How To Do It: You can ask questions like, “Where did you learn that asking for help indicated weakness?” Spend time exploring who would benefit from their beliefs, separating their narratives from personal values. Ensure that you’re validating the emotional impact of these beliefs, and not the belief itself.
7) Unique Outcomes / Sparkling Moments
The Unique Outcomes technique focuses on highlighting exceptions to the client’s problem-saturated story that reveal strengths and alternative possibilities.
What It Is: This technique involves identifying moments when the client acted contrary to the dominant problem story, even in small ways. These “exceptions” highlight strengths and possibilities that are not yet part of their main narrative.
How It Helps Clients: Highlighting unique outcomes can challenge the problem-saturated story, increase hope, and provide material for re-authoring a preferred narrative.
How To Do It: Ask questions like, “Can you tell me about a time when [the problem] didn’t control you?” Explore context, actions, thoughts, and feelings during these moments. Record or emphasize these experiences in session for later reflection.
8) Double Listening
This is a central narrative therapy stance that guides the therapist’s attention throughout sessions.
What It Is: Double listening involves attending both to the problem-saturated story and the client’s implicit values, skills, and acts of resistance.
How It Helps Clients: This technique validates the client’s agency, emphasizes their strengths, and uncovers potential paths for identity reconstruction.
How To Do It: While listening to your client, notice subtle moments of intention, hope, or resilience. Highlight these moments verbally or through reflective summaries.
9) Letter Writing
Letter writing extends therapeutic work into a tangible, reflective process outside of sessions.
What It Is: Letters are written narratives addressed to the self, the problem, or significant others, capturing insights, growth, or acts of resistance.
How It Helps Clients: Letters consolidate re-authoring, reinforce preferred narratives, and strengthen self-awareness.
How To Do It: Encourage clients to write about how they resisted the problem, their values, or desired identity. Therapists may also write letters summarizing sessions or unique outcomes.
10) Externalizing Journals
Journals provide a structured way for clients to track their interactions with the problem over time.
What It Is: This technique involves keeping a written record of the client’s experiences with the problem, including moments of resistance and alternative stories.
How It Helps Clients: Journaling allows clients to reflect, notice patterns, and collect material for re-authoring conversations.
How To Do It: Invite clients to write daily or weekly entries about problem impact, responses, and small victories. Use these notes to identify trends and exceptions.
11) Therapeutic Documentation / Certificates
Written acknowledgments can reinforce preferred identities and client strengths.
What It Is: Therapists create formal or informal documentation that highlights client achievements, unique outcomes, or emerging preferred narratives.
How It Helps Clients: Documentation validates growth, emphasizes progress, and reinforces identity reconstruction.
How To Do It: Provide written summaries of client strengths, milestone achievements, or preferred narrative traits after sessions. Encourage clients to keep them as reminders of progress.
12) Metaphor and Storytelling Techniques
Using metaphorical or fictional frameworks helps clients explore difficult experiences indirectly.
What It Is: Clients are guided to describe problems or alternative stories through metaphors, parables, or fictional narratives.
How It Helps Clients: Metaphors provide a safe distance from painful experiences, highlight alternative meanings, and foster creative re-authoring.
How To Do It: Invite clients to represent their problem as a story, character, or image, and explore ways it could evolve differently. Connect insights to their values and preferred identity.
7 Narrative Therapy Interventions to Use in Sessions
Narrative therapy interventions differ in that they are broader in scope, spanning multiple sessions and utilizing multiple techniques. Interventions are intentional, structured processes that contribute to long-term results, such as identity transformation. Narrative therapy intervention use is based on the level of care being provided, clients’ risks, trauma history, and their current goals.
1) Identity Reconstruction
Identity reconstruction focuses on helping clients rebuild their identity for long-term growth.
What It Is: This is a process that occurs over multiple sessions and focuses on dismantling a problem-focused identity, shifting to a preferred self-concept.
How It Helps Clients: This can help reduce fusion with mental health diagnoses and identity. Clients can experience long-term self-concept improvements.
How To Do It: Begin by identifying dominant identity themes, using externalizing language. Look for contradictory experiences throughout their life and focus on alternative identity traits. Alternative traits can be reinforced in future sessions until it feels more natural.
Check out our identifying core values worksheet
2) Trauma Re-Storytelling Intervention
This narrative therapy intervention can be used with clients whose trauma has become a core component of their identity and worldview.
What It Is: This intervention focuses on reorganizing trauma narratives to shift from helplessness to survival, resistance, and meaning making. This differs from exposure-based interventions because it focuses on reconstructing your client’s identity and incorporates endurance and strength.
How It Helps Clients: This intervention can help reduce trauma-based shame by helping clients separate their trauma response from their character judgments. This provides an opportunity to regain their dignity and sense of autonomy.
How To Do It: Ensure that your client has the skills and resources needed to maintain stabilization with this intervention. Begin by externalizing their symptoms and identifying small or large acts of resistance that occur during or after their traumatic experience. Spend time exploring what these acts show about their values. By gradually integrating their trauma into their life story rather than their identity.
3) Life Chapters Intervention
This narrative intervention focuses on organizing fragmented experiences into a coherent narrative.
What It Is: You will help your client divide their life into chapters, each with a title that reflects their growth, struggles, and transformation during that period.
How It Helps Clients: The life chapters intervention can help clients create a smooth narrative of their lives that identifies periods of resilience and provides insight into changes that have occurred over time. This can help decrease catastrophizing thinking patterns.
How To Do It: You can begin this intervention by asking your client to divide their life into different phases. Work with them to label each phase and identify strengths for each period. Focus on finding skills that were carried through to later stages, and focus on creating the next chapter in their story.
4) Timeline / Life Mapping Intervention
This intervention helps clients visualize and organize key life events and turning points.
What It Is: The client creates a chronological map or timeline of significant experiences, focusing on how they coped, resisted, and grew over time.
How It Helps Clients: This intervention provides perspective on patterns, highlights resilience, and supports re-authoring by connecting strengths across life events.
How To Do It: Work with clients to identify major events and transitions. Explore each event for acts of resistance, learning, or preferred identity traits. Use this map as a reference for future sessions.
5) Community / Outsider Witness Practices
This intervention incorporates supportive external perspectives to validate the client’s preferred narratives.
What It Is: Clients share aspects of their story with a supportive group or witness, who then reflect back observations of strengths, resilience, and values.
How It Helps Clients: Hearing their story validated externally can strengthen identity reconstruction, reduce isolation, and reinforce preferred narratives.
How To Do It: Facilitate structured sessions where witnesses reflect on what they heard, focusing on the client’s actions, values, and resistances rather than the problem itself.
6) Re-membering / Significant Others Intervention
This intervention explores the influence of important people in shaping and supporting the client’s narrative.
What It Is: Clients identify key figures in their lives and examine how these relationships have contributed to their identity, values, and coping strategies.
How It Helps Clients: Re-membering can strengthen preferred stories, highlight sources of support, and clarify the impact of relationships on identity.
How To Do It: Invite clients to discuss significant people, including how these figures have witnessed or supported their acts of resistance. Explore ways to incorporate positive relational influences into their ongoing narrative.
7) Certificates / Celebratory Practices Intervention
This intervention formalizes recognition of growth and resistance within sessions.
What It Is: Therapists provide tangible acknowledgments (certificates, letters, or symbolic markers) to celebrate client achievements and milestones.
How It Helps Clients: Reinforces identity reconstruction, consolidates progress, and increases motivation for continued change.
How To Do It: Identify key milestones or acts of resistance during therapy. Create a written acknowledgment or symbolic gesture that clients can retain to reflect on their progress.
Other Helpful Narrative Therapy Resources
Narrative therapy is an effective treatment option that can be used in a diverse range of treatment settings. If you gravitate towards using worksheets or other resources in sessions, we encourage you to explore the tools available with TherapyByPro. We offer customizable, evidence-based resources that can seamlessly be used in sessions. Examples of popular resources include:
Final Thoughts on Using Narrative Therapy in Sessions
Narrative therapy is a deeply human therapy that can help clients see that they are more than their symptoms or diagnosis. When we slow down, we can help clients find the strength, values, and resilience that they had during their darkest moments. Narrative therapy can be personal and gentle, helping clients see themselves in a healthier light in a low-pressure environment.
This overview is a brief introduction to narrative therapy techniques and interventions. While conversations associated with narrative therapy may feel natural, using them in session requires training, intentional language, and a profound understanding of the foundations of this approach. If you would like to learn more about narrative therapy and how to use it in your work, we encourage you to pursue training, consultation, and CEU opportunities.
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View all of our Narrative Therapy Worksheets