Understanding Our Approach
What is Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy is a collaborative approach that recognizes you as the expert in your own life. Rather than viewing problems as inherent parts of who you are, we explore the stories you tell about yourself and help you discover new, preferred narratives.
Our Commitment
Reflective, Evidence-Informed Practice
We hold a deep commitment to rigorous, critical, and reflective practice. Clients and those who refer to us can be assured that our practitioners are serious, accountable, and professionally grounded — not only in therapeutic skill but in ongoing engagement with social science research.
In complex legal and family matters, our work draws on both qualitative and quantitative research evidence. This includes cases that are subject to cross-examination, where our observations and reports must be defensible, precise, and ethically sound. We do not approach this work through the lens of competing therapeutic modalities, which we find an unhelpful and reductive frame.
Instead, we engage with the broader body of social science research that illuminates the phenomena at the heart of our work: how families form and fracture, how violence and coercive control operate, how cohesion and disunity unfold across relationships, generations, and societies. We investigate and mark how the carefully chosen ethical values of respect, safety, fairness, accountability, and responsibility are lived and understood across diverse communities.
Principles
Narrative therapy is built on the belief that the stories we carry about ourselves shape our identity and possibilities. Problems are not who you are—they are something you are experiencing. This distinction opens space for change, growth, and new possibilities.
Through conversations, we help you separate the problem from your sense of self, explore how it came to dominate your life story, and re-author your narrative in ways that feel more true and hopeful.
How It Works
- •Externalizing the problem: We talk about the problem as separate from you, making it easier to resist and overcome.
- •Unique outcomes: We identify moments when the problem didn't dominate—these become building blocks for change.
- •Re-authoring conversations: Together, we develop thicker, more preferred stories about who you are and what's possible.
- •Collaboration: You lead; we listen. Your knowledge of your life is central to the process.
What This Means for You
Narrative therapy offers a fundamentally respectful approach to counselling. You are not a diagnosis or a collection of symptoms. You are a person with wisdom, resilience, and untold stories of strength. Our role is to help you find and develop those stories, so you can live in a way that feels more true to who you are and who you want to become.
Origin Stories
Narrative therapy emerged from the post-structural movement toward multiple truths and was taken up in creative ways for helping people by David Epston in New Zealand and Michael White in Adelaide, Australia. We consider narrative therapy as being very homegrown and in our backyard kind of therapy. Ways of speaking are created from place and in place with acknowledgement and recognition of cultural and colloquial histories, whether that be in the pub, in the city or in remote communities.
Australia has developed its own cultural specifics related to its social cohesion, its sense of who we are, and its sense of who we are becoming. These local ways of knowing and being inform how narrative therapy is practised here—making it distinctly Australian in character and consciousness.
We also love that narrative therapy has been taken up in other wonderful places in the world and embraced and woven into the way stories are created for all languages and peoples. It is a practice that travels, that transforms, and that honours the particular wisdom of each community it touches.
"I can be changed by what happens to me.
But I refuse to be reduced by it."