Narrative therapy in Vaughan
You have described yourself the same way for so long that it now sounds like a fact. Lazy. Anxious. Too much. Narrative therapy in Vaughan starts by treating that description as one account among several, then goes looking for everything it leaves out.
No referral needed · in-person or online · with Registered Psychotherapists.
Psychotherapists
supervision
on your own life
20 minutes
Clinically reviewed by Svetlana Antonyshyn, Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO #001652). Last reviewed August 2026.
What does narrative therapy in Vaughan actually look like in a session?
Narrative therapy is a talking approach that treats a problem as separate from the person living with it. A Registered Psychotherapist helps you describe the problem in its own terms, trace where its story came from, and build up the moments it does not explain. Sessions in Vaughan run 55 minutes.
Michael White and David Epston built the approach in Australia and New Zealand during the 1980s around one line that still does most of the work: the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem. Everything else follows from taking that literally in the room.
In practice a session sounds like an unusually detailed interview. Your therapist asks what the problem tells you, when it is loudest, what it needs you to avoid in order to keep working, and who taught you the standard it is holding you to. Nobody hands you a reframe. The description gets built by you, out loud, with a therapist keeping track of the threads you drop halfway through.
Externalizing turns up in other work at the clinic too. On the eating disorder page you will see the same move used to separate the voice that comments on food from the voice that is actually yours. And if what brought you here is a flat feeling that your life does not add up to much, that concern is covered on our purpose and meaning page. This page is about the method.
The caveat belongs here rather than three scrolls down. The controlled research on narrative therapy is thinner than the research behind CBT or EMDR, and it does not appear as a recommended stand-alone treatment in the NICE guidelines. It also asks something specific of you, since the therapist deliberately declines the role of expert on your life. If what you want is a session-by-session protocol, worksheets between appointments and a symptom score that falls each week, cognitive behavioural therapy is the better fit, and we will tell you that at the free consultation rather than after six paid sessions.
Who practises narrative therapy at our Vaughan offices?
Two of our Registered Psychotherapists work this way. Carol McDowell, RP, CRPO 10937, sees clients in Barrie and came to therapy after a career spent listening to people tell their own stories, which shows in how she works with trauma, depression, grief and substance use. Hafiza Dakri, RP (Qualifying), CRPO 20273, works from Woodbridge with adults, couples and clients from age 12 upward.
Both registrations are on the public CRPO register and take about thirty seconds to check, which is the point of a public register.
Hafiza Dakri
Try the move: separating yourself from the problem
Michael White and David Epston built narrative therapy around one line: the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem. It sounds like a slogan until you use it on your own sentences. Here are four things people say in a first session. Click each one to see how a narrative therapist would put the same information back to you, and what they would ask next.
I am an anxious person. I have always been like this.
A narrative therapist would put it back as: anxiety has been showing up in your life for a long time, and lately it has been getting the first word. Same facts, different grammar. Once anxiety is a thing that arrives rather than a thing you are, it becomes possible to ask when it is loudest, what it warns you about, what it costs you, and where it has less influence than it used to. You cannot negotiate with an identity. You can negotiate with a visitor.
What narrative therapy helps with
You have stopped saying you are dealing with anxiety and started saying you are an anxious person, and the second version leaves you nowhere to stand. Externalizing puts the anxiety back outside you, where it can be described, questioned and negotiated with rather than confessed to.
A parent, a teacher, a school report or an ex-partner handed you a verdict about what kind of person you are, and decades later you still check your decisions against it. Narrative work traces where that account came from, who benefits from it, and whether you ever actually agreed to it.
People keep asking whether you are moving on, and the question feels wrong, because you do not want the relationship to end, you want it to change shape. Narrative therapy works with continuing the relationship in a different form rather than with closure, which is why it sits differently from stage-based grief models.
The job ended, the last child left, the marriage finished, or the diagnosis changed what your body can do, and the description of yourself you had used for years no longer matches anything. Sessions focus on what carried forward through the change and what you want the next account of yourself to include.
It says things in first person, using your vocabulary, so it is hard to tell where its opinions stop and yours start. Naming it as a separate voice with its own tactics makes it possible to notice when it is speaking and to answer it, which is the same move used on our eating disorder page.
On paper you have managed hard things repeatedly, and none of it registers as evidence, because every success gets filed as luck or timing. Narrative therapy hunts for those overlooked moments deliberately, treats them as data, and builds them into an account that can hold weight.
What your family, culture or faith community expects of you and what you actually want have stopped overlapping, and choosing either one feels like a betrayal. The work maps the competing stories and looks for a version you can live inside, rather than deciding which side wins.
A decision from years ago has become the whole summary of your character, and you have never told it out loud in one piece. Re-telling it with the context, pressures and intentions that were actually present usually produces a truer account than the compressed version you have been carrying.
Does narrative therapy actually work?
The evidence for narrative therapy is thinner than for most approaches we offer, and we would rather say so. There are encouraging individual trials across depression, resilience and living with cancer, and no large body of high quality work: the biggest pooled analysis rates its own certainty as very low.
orphaned and abandoned children in Rwanda. Ten weekly narrative therapy sessions produced significantly higher resilience than a delayed-treatment control group, whose scores fell over the same period.
Karibwende et al., European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2022
of 47 adults living with major depression reached clinically significant improvement after eight sessions of narrative therapy, and the gains still held three months later.
Vromans & Schweitzer, Psychotherapy Research (PMID 20306354), 2011
published studies of narrative therapy for eating disorders measured outcomes with standard psychological questionnaires. The reviewers said no conclusion about effectiveness could be drawn.
Conti, Heywood, Hay, Makaju Shrestha & Perich, Journal of Eating Disorders, 2022
people living with cancer across 9 studies. Quality of life improved in every one of them.
The reviewers said efficacy still could not be established: the controlled studies were not strong enough.
studies in the largest pooled analysis came from a single country. It reported a large reduction in depressive symptoms across 4,879 people, and its own authors rated the certainty of that evidence as very low.
Hu, Han, Gains & Jia, International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 2024
How does a course of narrative therapy in Vaughan usually unfold?
There is no fixed protocol, so the shape below is typical rather than promised. If you are medically unstable, in active withdrawal, or at physical risk from an eating disorder, meaning-focused conversation is not where to start, and the consultation will say so and help you get medical care in place first. Registered Psychotherapists do not diagnose or prescribe, and we coordinate with your family doctor when medical care belongs in the picture.
Narrative therapy has a thinner controlled evidence base than CBT or EMDR, and it is honest to say so.
Sessions one to three: giving it a name
Your therapist asks how the problem would introduce itself if it walked in ahead of you. When did it arrive, what does it promise, whose voice does it borrow. People often land on a name partway through the second session, the Fog, the Judge, the Rules, and once it has a name it stops being a permanent feature of your character and starts being something with a schedule.
The middle stretch: mapping its reach, and its limits
Together you trace where the problem has influence, whether that is your sleep, your marriage, or the job you read three times and did not apply for. Then you get equally specific about where it does not. The Tuesday you spoke up in the meeting gets treated as evidence rather than as a fluke. That second list is usually short at the start and noticeably longer by session eight.
Later: putting the other account on the record
The alternative version gets thickened with detail and made durable, sometimes through a letter your therapist writes between sessions, sometimes by inviting someone whose opinion of you matters into a session to say what they heard. Some people feel the shift inside eight to twelve sessions, some work for several months, and some pause and come back a year later with a different chapter.
What does a narrative therapist do differently?
The problem gets named and described as a separate character with its own tactics, timing and running costs. A therapist might ask when Perfectionism first recruited you, what it promises in exchange for the extra two hours, and what it has charged you by Thursday. The grammar change is small and the effect is not: you can negotiate with something that has a name.
Less time goes on why the problem started and more on the occasions it failed to run the show, because a cause explains the problem while an exception contradicts it. Expect to be asked about the last time you did the hard thing anyway, followed by a slow, almost tedious reconstruction of exactly how you managed it and what you drew on.
Two levels get worked at the same time, what you did and what it says about you. A therapist may ask what you had to call on to make that phone call, then what that suggests you value, then whether anyone in your life would have predicted it. Answers that start as "I do not know" usually fill in on the second pass.
You decide whose voice keeps a say in your life and whose gets demoted. In grief this often means continuing a relationship in a changed form instead of closing it, which is why the approach shows up so often in grief and bereavement counselling and in work with life transitions.
What therapy costs in Vaughan
No hidden fees. Most private insurance plans cover a portion of psychotherapy fees.
Meet a therapist, ask anything, and see if this approach feels right. No obligation.
Most private insurance plans cover a portion. Your first individual appointment is a 70-minute assessment at $245.
Full-length sessions for partners and families. Your first couples or family appointment runs 90 minutes at the same rate.
Reduced-fee sessions from $125 are available with select supervised therapists in training through our affordable therapy program.
Your questions, answered
What is narrative therapy and how does it work?
It treats the account you carry about yourself as something that was built, often out of other people's commentary, and therefore as something that can be examined. Your therapist helps you describe the problem in its own terms, works out where it holds influence over your week, then gathers up the moments that account quietly leaves out. Over time those moments get connected into a second, better documented version of events. Michael White and David Epston developed the approach in the 1980s. It is a talking therapy, with no worksheets and no required homework.
What does externalizing mean in narrative therapy?
Externalizing means speaking about the problem as though it sits outside you rather than inside your character. "I am an anxious person" becomes "anxiety talked you out of the call on Sunday night." The purpose is practical. Once the problem has a name, a schedule and a set of tactics, you can describe what it costs you and notice the times it loses ground, and neither of those is available while the problem and the person are treated as the same thing. Most people need a session or two before it feels natural.
Is narrative therapy the same thing as narrative exposure therapy?
No, and the similar names cause real confusion. Narrative exposure therapy is a short, structured treatment for post-traumatic stress, built for people who have lived through repeated traumatic events, in which you construct a chronological account of your life and work through the difficult memories in sequence. Narrative therapy, the approach described on this page, is broader, has no set number of sessions, and does not involve deliberate exposure to traumatic memories. If trauma is the reason you are looking, ask about EMDR at the consultation as well, since the evidence behind it for post-traumatic stress is considerably stronger.
What is the difference between narrative therapy and CBT?
Cognitive behavioural therapy treats thoughts as testable, gives you tasks between appointments and usually tracks symptom scores week to week, with the therapist holding expertise on the method. Narrative therapy leaves the expertise about your life with you, uses no worksheets, and moves at the pace of the conversation. The practical question is which one you actually want. If you like structure, measurement and something concrete to practise on Wednesday, choose CBT. If being handed a protocol has made you disengage before, narrative work tends to land better. We will give you an honest opinion at the consultation.
Does narrative therapy actually work, and what does the research say?
The evidence is thinner than for CBT or EMDR, and narrative therapy is not listed in the NICE guidelines as a recommended stand-alone treatment. Vromans and Schweitzer (2011) gave eight sessions to 47 adults living with major depression, and 53 percent reached clinically significant improvement that held at three months, though there was no control group. Hu and colleagues (2024) pooled 54 studies and 4,879 people, found a large effect on depressive symptoms, then rated the certainty of that evidence as very low. A 2022 review found only 3 of 33 eating disorder studies used outcome questionnaires.
What kinds of questions does a narrative therapist ask?
Expect questions that sound sideways at first. When did you first notice the Fog turning up, and who else was in the room. What does it promise you, and what does it charge for that. When it had you cornered last month, what did you do that it did not expect. What would your sister say she has watched you do that does not fit the story you just told me. The therapist asks, you decide which answers carry weight, and nothing gets interpreted on your behalf.
How many narrative therapy sessions will I need, and what does it cost in Vaughan?
There is no set number, because the approach is not manualized. Some people feel a shift inside eight to twelve weekly sessions, others work for several months, and plenty pause and return. The first step is a free 20-minute consultation. Individual sessions are $180 for 55 minutes, a first adult assessment is $245 for 70 minutes, and couples and family sessions are $280 for 85 minutes. Psychotherapy in private practice is not covered by OHIP, though most extended health plans cover a portion, and we bill Sun Life, SSQ and Green Shield directly.
Who is narrative therapy not a good fit for?
If you are medically unstable, in active withdrawal, or at physical risk from an eating disorder, meaning-focused conversation is not where to begin, and we will help you get medical care in place first. Registered Psychotherapists do not diagnose or prescribe, and we coordinate with your family doctor when that belongs in the picture. It is also a poor match if you want a structured program with worksheets and weekly symptom scores, or if you would rather be told what to do than be asked what you think.
Where to see us in person, or meet online
Three offices across Vaughan and Barrie, plus secure video sessions anywhere in Ontario. Evenings and weekends available.
Three steps, starting today
Book your free consult
Online in 2 minutes or by phone. No referral, no credit card.
Meet your therapist
Talk it through and get matched with the right fit for you.
Rewrite the account
Build up the version of your story that includes what you have survived and what you value.