Cherish DeOliveira, Psy.D. • November 21, 2025
Narrative Therapy: How Your Story Shapes Your Life
The decision to enter therapy can be fraught with apprehension and ambivalence. Many of the clients I meet with will tell me they’ve agonized for quite some time before making their decision to seek out a therapist.
Why? They were worried about being judged, misunderstood, and having their struggles pathologized. It is a common fear associated with traditional therapy approaches that often emphasize the “What is wrong with you?” approach to treatment. We know this increases stigma around mental health services, and further marginalizes those seeking support when they view themselves as “less than” for needing help. Therapists can unintentionally contribute to this structural stigma by continuing to place themselves as “experts” while disempowering clients from accessing agency in their own healing. What can be done about this dynamic?
Narrative Therapy is an approach that offers clients an opportunity to reflect on how their lived experiences have shaped their world view and understanding of themselves. One of the benefits of using a narrative therapy approach is its deeply collaborative nature. The idea behind this modality of treatment is to get at the client’s “story.” In other terms, what is the version of themselves and the world around them that they carry in personal narratives. Narrative Therapy posits that the individual’s story shapes their thoughts, feelings, and actions. By getting insight into the themes and patterns present in their life story, clients begin to see themselves as experts in their own right. They then can take ownership to revise and re-author the aspects of their stories that are outdated, unhelpful, and at times harmful to their health, personal growth, career development, and relationships.
Where to begin?
In my first appointment with clients, I will ask them what their goals are for therapy. Most of the time, the answers I get actually tell me everything about what clients identify as “problems” that are getting in the way of their goals. This is the beginning of understanding a client’s
problem-saturated narrative. Many of the themes listed here will repeat across clients of different ages, genders, ethnicities, and socio-economic markers. The most common “problem-areas” I have encountered in my clinical practice include:
- “I am not good enough:” someone will hold self-critical views that highlight their inadequacies and mistakes, while minimizing their strengths and accomplishments
- “I am too much:” someone will be hypervigilant to their perceived flaws and attempt to present themselves in social situations as amenable, agreeable, and “easy-going”
- “I am falling behind:” someone will hold rigid beliefs around needing to achieve certain milestones of adulthood based on an impersonal socio-cultural “timeline,” even if that deviates from their personal goals
- “I am smart but lazy:” someone will focus on what they have failed to achieve, minimize their efforts, and downplay their wins
- “I am not smart but I work hard:” someone will overly rely on effort, often to the point of burn out and minimize their built-in strengths and attributes
- “I am difficult to love:” someone will assume their difficulties in interpersonal relationships are caused by their fixed flaws and negatives traits
- “I am a fraud and will be found out:” someone who has achieved some degree of success will experience fear that they have “tricked” their way into achievements (personal and professional) and are at risk of “losing everything” if others were to know them deeply
- “I am bad and deserve mistreatment:” someone will convince themselves that being hurt by others is justified based on a core belief that their “badness” is inherent
- “I have no control over what happens to me:” someone will place the “cause” of all their problems and challenges outside of their control, contributing to a sense of helplessness to change their circumstances
- “I am to blame for everything that happens to me:” someone will place self-blame at the center of their problem-saturated narrative, removing the influence of their socio-cultural-historical context and other situations outside of their control
- “I am broken and unlovable:” someone will mistake their painful experiences with the essence of who they are and believe their past traumas make them unworthy of love and belonging
It is not hard to imagine that anyone walking around with this never-ending “problem” list about themselves would experience emotional distress, relationship difficulties, and low self-esteem. Their life story has been skewed to highlight areas of difficulty, pain, and struggle, while strengths, virtues, and achievements have been diminished or completely erased from conscious awareness. Examining the problem-saturated narrative is the first step to taking ownership and practicing cognitive flexibility to ask: “What am I missing in my story?”
Revision Work and Deconstructing the Dominant Narrative
Using a narrative therapy approach allows me to join clients in the revision of their problem-saturated narrative. This leads to the active work of creating an
alternative narrative, to remove the limiting-beliefs clients hold about themselves and the world around them. This process is also known as “re-authoring.”
One strategy I will explore with clients is the notion of deconstructing the dominant narrative. This allows for clients to experience ownership and agency, without becoming stuck in self-blame and shame-induced critical thinking. Here are some examples of what is explored in this stage of therapy:
- Personal History: exploring what challenges the client has faced and their resilience, perseverance, and courage in moments of overcoming struggle
- Social Context: naming aspects of the client’s identity which have been marginalized due to structural stigma, such as discrimination based on racial identity, gender, religious affiliation, sexuality, and documentation status.
- Personal Choice: working collaboratively to examine choices available to clients to improve their quality of life that have previously been overlooked or ignored due to fears, insecurities, and socio-historical barriers present in the problem-saturated narrative
Revision Work and Externalizing the Problem
Many clients have learned to internalize their mental health symptoms, to the degree that they have developed an association between their problems and their identity. This has become common vernacular in our everyday lives. Most of us hear others and ourselves say the following:
- “I am depressed and down all the time”
- “I am so anxious. I live in constant worry”
- “I am so OCD that I fixate on every little problem”
Statements like this create a blending between the problem someone is experiencing (depression, anxiety, OCD) and who they ARE. By working to place the problem outside of the client–that is,
externalizing the problem–we are better able to establish a healthy separation between someone’s sense of self and how they experience their symptoms. This approach allows clients to experience enough psychological distance from an identified “problem” in order to experience themselves as existing separate from and independent of the issue they are facing. Here are some examples of how I have used this with clients over the years:
- Externalize the Diagnosis: reframing clinical diagnoses, such as anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, panic disorder into experiences outside of the client (e.g., “The Depression” vs “You are depressed”), to avoid placing the problem inside the client
- Discover the Influence: working with the notion that the problem exists outside of the client, using questions to better understand how the problem attempts to “influence” the client (e.g., “How does The OCD get in the way of your self trust?”)
- Begin to Strategize: once the problem exists outside of the person, working together and brainstorming ways to reduce the problem’s influence (e.g., “Do you think The Anxiety has any weaknesses? Are there ways we can try to outsmart its influence over you?”)
- Notice the Wins: place emphasis on the client’s efforts to resist the influence of the problem, and use curiosity to explore how these wins are possible (e.g., “Even with The Depression hanging heavy on your back, you still made it to your cousin’s event. How were you able to do that?”)
Benefits to Narrative Therapy
There are many benefits to using a Narrative Therapy approach. Some of these include:
- New Possibilities: encouraging clients to examine their expertise and knowledge from their lived experience can facilitate hopefulness in taking action steps for change.
- Collaboration: therapists and clients work together, and are building an alliance against the identified problem. This can decrease the stigma associated with mental health care by humanizing the client and reducing the power-imbalance in the therapy relationship.
- Reducing Blame & Shame: when clients increase their sense of agency and ownership over their lives, they can become less vulnerable to paralysis and overwhelm from shame and self-blame. They can be responsible for making changes without fearing that accepting accountability makes them weak or at fault.
If you would like to learn more about Narrative Therapy, we encourage you to reach out to our practice. You can get connected with a psychologist who has expertise in narrative therapy by filling out the
Request an Appointment form.
Reference:
White, Michael (2004) Narrative Practice and the Unpacking of Identity Conclusions. Dulwich Centre Publications
https://dulwichcentre.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Unpacking-Identity-Conclusions.pdf
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