A narrative therapist works with the stories people hold about themselves, on the basis that the account someone carries of who they are shapes what feels possible for them going forward. If someone has come to see themselves primarily through the lens of a single problem, that story tends to narrow their sense of what they are capable of well beyond the problem itself.
Separating the person from the problem
The central technique in this approach is externalising, a deliberate move to separate the person from the problem so that the difficulty becomes something they are dealing with, rather than something they fundamentally are. A person is not "an alcoholic" so much as someone dealing with alcohol's grip on their life, a small shift in language that opens up a different relationship to the problem itself.
Filling in the missing parts of the story
From there, the work looks for the parts of someone's history that the dominant, problem-saturated story tends to leave out, gradually building a fuller and more accurate account of who they are. Developed by Michael White and David Epston, narrative therapy is widely used in family and community settings, where a shared story about a family or group can be just as limiting as an individual one.