The house was the plan. Not just a house — the specific one, in the specific town, with the school district and the backyard and the room that could finally be a home office. Years of working toward it, and then, at some point, it was there. The plan had arrived.
What I hear, not infrequently, is that the plan arriving didn't quite settle the question the plan was supposed to answer.
I work with adults throughout New Jersey — in Montclair and Summit, Short Hills, Ridgewood, Morristown, Westfield, and the other towns that draw professionals out of the city when the city has done what it could do. The people I work with are not, as a rule, in crisis. They are, by most measures, living the life they intended to live. Some commute into the city a few days a week; others work entirely from home, in the town they moved to partly so that they could. Either way, the career has delivered something close to what was promised.
And yet something keeps returning, in the gaps the busy life doesn't quite fill: a sense that the story being lived doesn't fully belong to the person living it.
That feeling is what narrative therapy is designed to examine.
Life in the towns along the Morris and Essex County lines, and in Bergen County, and down through Union County, tends to be full — full in ways that don't leave much room for the quieter questions. The calendar is full. The obligations are real. To feel unsettled inside all of that fullness is not something the culture around you makes easy to say out loud.
But the unsettledness has its own logic. Most of us arrive at our lives carrying stories we didn't write — about what success looks like, what a good life requires, what kind of person we're supposed to be by now. These stories come from families, from professional cultures, from the particular towns we grew up in or chose to move to. They are not always wrong. But they tend to be thin — organized around achievement and legibility, leaving out the more complicated and more accurate evidence of who a person actually is. And when the story you've been living was written more by expectation than by choice, there tends to come a moment — sometimes quiet, sometimes harder to ignore — when the gap between that story and a more honest one becomes difficult to set aside.
Narrative therapy works with that gap directly. The approach, developed by Michael White and his colleague David Epston, begins from a deceptively simple premise: the person is not the problem. The problem is the problem. The discomfort of living a life that feels slightly misaligned is not a character flaw or a failure of gratitude — it's a signal that the dominant story has become too narrow to hold the full picture of who someone is.
The questions that follow from this are not comfortable ones: Whose story is this, and how much of it did you actually choose? What has been left out of the account you carry about yourself? And crucially — what are the moments that don't fit the dominant narrative, the experiences that point toward something different? In White and Epston's framework, those moments aren't anomalies to be explained away. They are the most important material in the room — openings into what they called a preferred story, a richer and more accurate account of a person's life that the dominant narrative has been crowding out.
The therapist's role in this is not to provide that account, but to help the person find it themselves. You are the expert on your own life; the work is learning to read it differently.
These are not questions that resolve in a single conversation. Narrative therapy as I practice it is less about producing answers than about creating the conditions in which a more honest, more complete story can begin to take shape — which requires time, and a space apart from the pace of the life that has been filling all the available space.
What I've noticed, across years of this work, is that the people who arrive at these questions are not people who did something wrong. Some arrive here earlier than they expected — the career moved faster than the interior life had time to keep up with, and the story settled before it was fully examined. Others have been building for longer and are only now finding the space to ask whether the story they've been living is the one they'd choose. In either case, the questions are not a sign of failure. They are a sign that something in the life is ready to be looked at more carefully.
The story doesn't have to stay the way it was handed to you. But that's work that takes more than the gaps between other things to do well.
I offer telehealth therapy for adults throughout New Jersey and in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist providing narrative therapy and other approaches via telehealth in New Jersey and several other states.