There is a particular kind of account that surfaces early in therapy — coherent, practiced, assembled from real experience. Someone describing how they always end up in the same situation, how they have never quite been able to do the thing they said they wanted, how the version of themselves they intended to become keeps receding. They tell it fluently, with evidence, in a way that sounds like the only honest account of who they are.
In Narrative Therapy, this is the problem story. It isn't invented. It has been built from real material — real disappointment, real pattern, real years of confirming evidence. What it has also been doing, quietly, is organizing which experiences count and which ones don't.
No problem story is total. However saturated a person's account of themselves, there are always moments that don't fit — experiences of competence, connection, integrity, or genuine choice that the problem narrative has no room for. In narrative therapy these are called sparkling moments. They tend to be small. They get explained away — that was different, that doesn't count, I just got lucky. They are the evidence the problem story has learned to dismiss.
The work is not to argue with the problem story. It is to find the sparkling moments it cannot account for, and to begin linking them — asking what they have in common, what values they reflect, what they suggest about who this person is when the problem story isn't running the room. A moment of staying when the easier choice was leaving. A decision made from genuine conviction rather than fear. A relationship, maybe years back, where something real was possible. These moments are not exceptions that prove the rule. They are the beginning of a different account.
As the linking deepens — as sparkling moments are gathered and connected into a thread — something begins to shift in how a person holds themselves. Not through positive thinking, and not by arguing the problem story into submission. But through the recognition that the story they have been telling is one selection from the available evidence, and that a different selection, equally honest, produces a person they recognize more fully. This is what narrative therapy calls the preferred story — not an idealized version of the self, but a richer and more accurate one.
The people I work with in New York — in the West Village, on the Upper East Side, in Tribeca, Park Slope, and Brooklyn Heights — often arrive with problem stories that are especially well-constructed. The city runs on legible, high-performing narratives, and the counterpart to a strong external story is often a problem story of equal precision: the internal account of every way the achievement is insufficient, every pattern that keeps recurring, every version of the self that hasn't arrived. Narrative therapy in this context isn't about reframing or optimism. It's about accounting more accurately — finding what the problem story has been leaving out, and discovering whether it changes anything to include it. It usually does.
I work with adults throughout New York — in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and across the city — through telehealth sessions. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Narrative Therapy
What is narrative therapy?
Narrative therapy explores the stories people carry about themselves — how those stories formed, what they include, and what they leave out. It treats identity as something constructed through experience and meaning-making over time, not as a fixed set of traits or diagnoses.
What does narrative therapy help with?
It is well-suited for people navigating persistent feelings of stuckness, recurring relationship patterns, life transitions, and the sense that the story they have been telling about themselves no longer — or never did — fit who they actually are.
How is narrative therapy different from CBT?
CBT works to identify and challenge specific thought patterns in the present. Narrative therapy examines the broader story a person has constructed about themselves — the framework inside which those thoughts occur — and asks whether that story is the most accurate account available.
Who is a good fit for narrative therapy?
It tends to work well for people who are reflective and drawn to language and meaning as ways of understanding their experience, and who are interested in building a richer account of themselves rather than simply managing symptoms.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist offering narrative therapy via telehealth in New York and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.