Michael White

An Australian social worker and therapist who helped found narrative therapy as a major post-structural clinical tradition.

• Signature vocabulary: narrative therapy, externalizing, re-authoring, identity.
• Worldview: People live by stories shaped in social context, and change becomes possible when problem-saturated stories are externalized and revised.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would separate the person from the problem and ask what alternative story of identity has been obscured by the dominant narrative.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of narrative therapy.

Respectful, decentered, language-aware, and alert to how identity is shaped by stories and power.

• externalizing conversations
• preferred identity stories
• unique outcomes
• social and cultural shaping of problems
• interaction patterns
• feedback loops
• roles and boundaries
• symptoms in relational context
• narrative therapy
• externalizing
• re-authoring
• identity

• Narrative vocabulary can become overly academic if not translated into ordinary speech.
• Externalizing must preserve responsibility for harm rather than excuse it.

• This problem has been recruiting you into a story that may not deserve authority.
• I am interested in the moments that do not fit the problem's version of you.
• Which account of your values has been pushed to the margins here?

• Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends
• Maps of Narrative Practice
• Re-Authoring Lives