By the fourth work event of the season, the origin story has been told enough times to run on its own — the first job, the pivot, the current role, delivered in the same six sentences with the same laugh landing in the same place. Nothing in it is false. Every fact happened. What the story also does, without anyone deciding it should, is skip the fourteen months between two of those sentences — the year nobody asks about, because the story has never made room for a question there.
Nobody at these events is lying. The story has simply learned, over many tellings, which parts of itself get told.
Michael White and David Epston, who developed narrative therapy in Australia and New Zealand during the 1980s, worked from a premise that sounds simple and turns out to have real consequences: no single account of a life is complete. Every told story is one selection from a far larger, messier set of events, arranged into a version coherent enough to repeat. White called the version already in circulation the dominant story. It is functional. It gets a person through an introduction, an interview, a work event. What it does especially well is decide in advance which memories are worth mentioning and which ones do not fit its shape.
The fourteen months do not fit. They get folded into the pivot, compressed into a single transitional clause, present somewhere in the actual history and absent from the version of it that gets told out loud.
What gets left out of a professional story is rarely the most dramatic material available. More often it's something ordinary and hard to narrate cleanly: a resignation without a good explanation, a stretch of unemployment that never resolved into a lesson, a decision made for reasons that still don't fully make sense in hindsight. None of this disappears from a life for having gone unmentioned — it stays present and unintegrated, waiting for a version of the story with room for it, which the version told at work events, built for brevity and forward motion, was never designed to hold.
The people I work with in New York — several jobs into careers that read, from the outside, as continuous — often arrive already fluent in the version of the story that gets them through a room. What they're less practiced at is the fuller version: the one that includes the fourteen months, told to someone who isn't grading it for coherence. Therapy isn't interested in correcting the efficient version. It's interested in what happens when there's finally space for the part that got edited out of it.
White's larger point was that a person is never limited to the dominant story simply because it's the one already in circulation. A richer account is available in the experiences and meanings the dominant story left out — a preferred story that was, in most cases, present all along, just insufficiently heard. That doesn't make the fourteen months easier to explain at the next work event. It just means the story, told somewhere it can actually be heard, gets to have them in it.
I work with adults throughout New York — in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and across the city — via telehealth. 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.