Narrative Therapy
The narrative approach offers a special kind of counselling that looks to separate you from your problems by talking about them as if they were outside of you.
Instead of “when I’m angry” we talk about the times “the Anger” seems to convince you to act in certain ways or think certain things.
This is one of the ways that narrative conversations open up space for something new to occur and invite people to take a more active roll in writing their story.
There are other types of questions and attitudes that are important to the narrative approach. But perhaps the best way to get a feel for what narrative style counselling can look like is through, well, a narrative, or three…
Below are three made up stories that I hope might invite you to think about how narrative counselling might benefit you.
Meet Ben.
This is a fictional example created to illustrate how counselling conversations might unfold. It does not describe any real client.
Ben is thirty-three. If you met him at work, you’d probably describe him as capable, dependable and calm.
Few people know that almost every day feels like a battle inside his own mind.
For months, he’s found himself constantly imagining everything that could go wrong. Before meetings, he rehearses conversations over and over. If his partner seems quieter than usual, he worries he’s done something wrong. At night, his mind races through tomorrow’s problems before they have even happened.
He calls it anxiety.
By the time Ben comes to counselling, he has read books, listened to podcasts and tried to think more positively. Sometimes those things help for a while, but the worrying always seems to find its way back.
Increasingly, he has begun to wonder whether he is simply “an anxious person.”
Rather than assuming anxiety tells us who Ben is, his counsellor asked questions that were interested in anxiety itself.
When does it show up?
What promises does it make?
What does it convince Ben he must do in order to stay safe?
As Ben begins describing it, anxiety starts to take on a clearer shape. It tells him that certainty is the only way to feel secure. It encourages him to rehearse every possibility, prepare for every outcome and never let his guard down.
The more authority anxiety gathers, the smaller Ben’s world becomes.
But alongside these conversations, Ben and his counsellor also begin noticing moments that anxiety hadn’t managed to erase.
Ben remembers taking his daughter camping despite worrying something would go wrong. He remembers accepting a new role at work even though it terrified him. He remembers difficult seasons he had already survived—seasons anxiety had confidently predicted would overwhelm him.
These weren’t grand victories, in fact, Ben had almost forgotten them. Yet together they began telling another story.
Not the story that anxiety wanted him to believe—that he was fragile and constantly one mistake away from everything falling apart—but a story of someone who had quietly been showing courage for years.
The counsellor didn’t ask Ben to pretend anxiety wasn’t real. Nor did they try to convince him never to worry again.
Instead, they helped him become more familiar with anxiety’s voice, more aware of the influence it was trying to have over his life, and more connected to the many experiences that suggested anxiety was never telling the whole story.
Anxiety still visits Ben from time to time.
But it no longer gets the final say in how he understands himself.
Meet Jess.
This is a fictional example created to illustrate how counselling conversations might unfold. It does not describe any real client.
Jess is twenty-two. She grew up in the church — not the fire-and-brimstone kind, but the kind with good coffee and a genuine sense of community and people who really did seem to love each other. For most of her life, that community felt like home.
Somewhere in her late teens, something shifted. She can't point to the exact moment. But she found herself sitting in the same seat she'd sat in her whole life, singing the same songs, and feeling increasingly like an imposter. Like everyone around her had access to something she didn't. Like faith came naturally to them in a way it had never quite come naturally to her.
She started to wonder whether the doubts she carried — quiet, persistent, embarrassing — meant she didn't really belong there at all. She never said this out loud. She smiled on Sunday mornings and said she was fine. But the doubts had started to feel like a verdict. Like evidence of something defective at her core.
By the time she came to counselling, she had pulled back from most of her friendships, was sleeping badly, and described herself as someone who couldn't seem to get it together. She'd tried journalling, prayer, a new small group. Nothing moved the thing that sat in her chest.
The thing in her chest, she said, felt like shame.
In their early conversations, her counsellor didn't try to resolve the doubts or reassure her that her faith was fine. Instead, he got curious about the shame itself. Where had it come from? When had Jess first got the sense that doubt made her lesser?
Slowly, a history began to emerge. Jess had grown up in a community that, with the best of intentions, had equated certainty with faithfulness. Questions were gently discouraged. Doubt was framed as a failure of trust. She had absorbed this so young, and so thoroughly, that she had never once considered it might not be true. She had simply assumed the problem was her.
Her counsellor asked whether she had ever met anyone she admired who also carried questions. She paused for a long time. Then she started naming people — writers she loved, a grandmother she had adored, a mentor at university who had seemed more fully alive than almost anyone she knew. Every one of them, she realised, had wrestled with uncertainty their entire lives.
He asked what it said about her that she had kept showing up — to her community, to her faith, to herself — even while carrying all of this.
She didn't have an answer. But something in the question caught her off guard.
Over the following months, a different story about Jess began to surface. Not a story that resolved her doubts, or told her what to believe, or pointed her back toward certainty. But a story in which her questions were not evidence of a flaw — they were evidence of someone thinking carefully, taking things seriously, refusing to settle for something that didn't ring true.
The shame didn't disappear. But it began, slowly, to loosen its grip. Jess started to recognise the difference between the voice that told her she was defective and her sense of who she was. They weren't the same thing. They had never been the same thing.
She still goes to church. She still doesn't have all the answers. But she no longer experiences doubt as a secret she has to hide. It has become, instead, part of a more honest story — one she is still in the middle of writing.
Meet Sam.
This is a fictional example created to illustrate how counselling conversations might unfold. It does not describe any real client.
Sam is thirty-eight. He has a good job, a wife he loves, and two young children who think the world of him.
From the outside, life looks steady.
Inside, though, Sam often feels like he’s slowly disappearing.
He can’t remember the last time someone asked him how he was doing and he answered honestly. Somewhere along the way, he’d come to believe that being a good husband, father and employee meant holding everything together. When work became stressful, he worked harder. When life at home became overwhelming, he told himself other people had it worse. If he ever felt anxious or discouraged, he tried to push through it without burdening anyone else.
He wasn’t sure when coping had become pretending.
By the time Sam came to counselling, he described feeling flat and disconnected. Things that once mattered to him no longer seemed to hold much colour. He often wondered what the point of everything was, but quickly dismissed the thought as ungrateful. After all, he had a good life. Why couldn’t he just enjoy it?
Rather than searching for what was wrong with Sam, his counsellor became curious about the expectations he had quietly come to live under.
Where had he learnt that strength meant carrying everything alone?
Who had taught him that needing support was something to overcome rather than something to share?
What had those ideas made possible in his life—and what had they cost him?
As they talked, Sam began remembering moments that didn’t quite fit the story he had always believed about himself.
He remembered a conversation with an old friend where he’d admitted he was struggling, and how deeply relieving it had been to hear, “I’ve been there too.”
He remembered how naturally he encouraged his own children to talk about their feelings, even though he rarely gave himself the same permission.
He realised that the people he respected most weren’t the ones who never struggled. They were the people who seemed comfortable enough in themselves to be honest about it.
Slowly, another story began to emerge.
Not a story where Sam became fearless or had life all figured out, but one where courage looked less like carrying everything alone and more like allowing himself to be known.
That new story didn’t arrive all at once. There were still days when the old expectations felt familiar and convincing.
But they no longer held the same unquestioned authority.
Over time, Sam found himself making small changes that reflected the kind of life he wanted to live. He spoke more honestly with his wife. He accepted help from a friend instead of automatically saying, “I’ve got it.” He made space for things that left him feeling more alive, even when they seemed unproductive.
None of these changes happened because someone told Sam who he should become.
They grew out of conversations that helped him notice the stories he had inherited, consider whether they still deserved to shape his life, and reconnect with values that had been present all along but had gone largely unnoticed.
Today, Sam still faces difficult seasons. But he no longer believes he has to face them alone. And perhaps more importantly, he is beginning to discover that his worth was never dependent on how well he could keep everything together.
Sound inviting?