Narrative therapy,
disability and identity.

Two evenings

Constructed scenes

Good support should sometimes disappear into the background of an ordinary life.

Choose a route

The central distinction

Our framework

In narrative therapy, “story” doesn’t mean fiction. It means the way experiences are selected, connected and interpreted. Consider three statements:

1. “People have sometimes refused to help me.” An experience.
2. “Nobody will tolerate my needs.” Experiences connected into an expectation.
3. “I am a burden.” An expectation turned into a conclusion about identity.

Therapy can explore the movement between these. It must also establish what actually happened: discrimination, pain, inaccessible housing and inadequate help don’t become imaginary because their meanings are explored.

What narrative therapy is

Established theory

Narrative therapy was developed in the 1980s by Michael White in Adelaide, Australia, and David Epston in Auckland, New Zealand. Their book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990) set out the approach, and White’s Maps of Narrative Practice (2007) described its main conversational “maps”. It drew on the philosopher Michel Foucault’s work on power and dominant knowledges, the psychologist Jerome Bruner’s ideas about narrative, and the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff’s work on how communities witness one another.

Its central practices include:

• Externalising conversations: talking about a problem as separate from the person, so that its effects and tactics can be examined.
• Deconstruction: exploring where a dominant story came from, whose interests it serves, and what it leaves out.
• Unique outcomes: noticing moments that don’t fit the dominant story.
• Re-authoring: developing those moments into a richer, preferred account of a life. Michael White, drawing on Jerome Bruner, described moving between the landscape of action (what happened, who was involved) and the landscape of identity (what this might say about values, intentions and commitments).
• Double listening and the “absent but implicit”: hearing a person’s distress while also wondering what it suggests they value, hoped for, or feel has been violated.
• Re-membering: reconsidering who has membership in a person’s “club of life”, and whose voices should count.
• Definitional ceremonies and outsider witnesses: inviting others to hear and respond to a person’s preferred story.
• Therapeutic documents: letters, certificates and records that hold the preferred story.

The therapist’s stance is often described as decentred but influential: the client is the expert on their life, while the therapist shapes the conversation through questions. Narrative work happens with individuals, families, groups and communities, including collective approaches such as the Tree of Life, which Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo and David Denborough developed in Southern Africa from an earlier popular-education exercise.

Its intellectual roots are philosophical as much as clinical. Explaining narrative practice’s assumptions, for example that identities are shaped by social power, is not the same as demonstrating that every difficulty is socially produced.

Thin descriptions, and richer ones

A thin description leaves little room for complexity: “difficult patient”, “dependent adult”, “attention-seeking”, “the strong one”. They are often produced by people or institutions with authority. Positive labels can be thin too. “You’re so resilient” might leave out exhaustion, the support of others, anger, the lack of alternatives, or a wish to stop having to be resilient. A richer account need not be flattering. It can include mistakes, contradictions, grief, responsibility and pleasure.

A useful question: “What does this description fail to include?”

From identity conclusion to something to explore

Our framework

These are suggestions, not names a therapist should impose. Externalising doesn’t mean a problem must have started outside the person, and it doesn’t remove responsibility for actions: someone can explore the influence of anger while staying accountable for frightening a partner.

Assumptions to check in how narrative work is delivered

Our framework

These aren’t requirements of narrative therapy itself. They are places where a particular way of delivering it can create barriers, or be misused. Established narrative practice already contains resources for avoiding many of them.

What it does well for disabled people

• It relocates the problem. “The person is not the problem” is close to the social model’s claim that disability is produced by barriers and attitudes. Disabled narrative practitioners have described this explicitly as relocating the problem of disability. For how different approaches handle the same situation, see Comparing Approaches.
• It names cultural stories and power. Ideas such as “disabled people are burdens”, “disability is a tragedy” or “disabled people are inspiring” can be examined as stories with histories and effects, not only as personal beliefs.
• It honours interdependence. Re-membering can include personal assistants, disabled friends and elders, online communities and people who are no longer alive. It doesn’t treat needing others as a problem.
• It values witness and community. Definitional ceremonies, documents and collective practice give stories an audience beyond the therapy room, which can be powerful for people who are used to being talked about rather than heard.

Where it can misread disability

Our framework

What adapting it well looks like

Practice

• Ask what the person wants externalised. Often it is not the disability but the burden story, ableism, pain, the benefits system, or “the Should”. Some people do want to externalise pain or fatigue as a character. That is their choice.
• Widen how stories are told. Photos, objects, drawings, timelines, short episodes, text, AAC and stories co-told with a trusted supporter (with consent) can all carry re-authoring. The aim, a richer account of what the person values, stays the same.
• Frame unique outcomes around values, not improvement. A unique outcome might be resting without guilt, asking for help, or saying no to a cure narrative.
• Make documents accessible. Letters and certificates can be Easy Read, audio, large print or video.
• Choose witnesses carefully. Disabled peers, chosen family, online communities. Ask who the person would want to hear their story.
• Keep material reality in view. Questioning the burden story alongside, not instead of, getting more support.

Where narrative work fits, and what else may be needed

Narrative work shouldn’t become a substitute for everything else. It may fit poorly when someone dislikes its language, needs a different immediate intervention, or finds the questions effortful or artificial.

Open questions

• Should disability ever be externalised? Some disabled people find externalising their condition freeing; others find it erasing. Practitioners disagree, and the person’s own relationship to their disability probably has to decide.
• Must the preferred story be hopeful? Arthur Frank’s work on illness stories describes restitution, chaos and quest narratives. A disability-informed practice might argue that a person has the right to tell an unresolved story and be heard in it.
• How much evidence is enough? Narrative therapy has a smaller research base than some approaches, and some practitioners question whether standard outcome trials fit its aims. Others argue that without them, claims should stay modest.
• Can it go wrong in quieter ways? A therapist can steer towards a preferred identity they personally admire. Searching for resistance can make survival sound heroic. Story work can overlook material limits. Externalising language can feel distancing or childish. Social critique can become formulaic. Hope can become another performance expectation.
• Expert or not? Narrative therapy’s non-expert stance can be liberating for people tired of professional authority. Some disabled clients also want clear expert information, for example about their condition, and need both.

The narrative therapy library

Stories about me

How narrative work happens

Relationships and ways of telling

Difficult experiences and limits

Evidence & sources

Sources checked in October 2026, using targeted searches rather than a systematic review. “We have not located” means our searches did not find it.