Best 10 Narrative Therapy Books

1. What is narrative therapy?

By Alice Morgan

This best-selling book is an easy-to-read introduction to the ideas and practices of narrative therapy. It uses accessible language, has a concise structure and includes a wide range of practical examples.

What Is Narrative Practice? covers a broad spectrum of narrative practices including externalisation, re-membering, therapeutic letter writing, rituals, leagues, reflecting teams and much more.

2. The Narrative Therapy Workbook

By Jneé Hill LCSW

Using this Narrative Therapy workbook, you’ll learn to examine those stories and rewrite them to reflect the life you want to live.

• An empowering tool—Learn about Narrative Therapy, its origins, and how your narratives can shape who you are.
• Flip your story—Match your narrative to who and what you want to be with a wide range of strategies, exercises, and practices.
• Inspire positive change—Build your new stories through reflective prompts and uplifting affirmations. The pen is in your hand, and you can write the next chapter!

3. Retelling the Stories of Our Lives

By David Denborough

Filled with relatable examples, useful exercises, and informative illustrations, Retelling the Stories of Our Lives leads readers on a path to reclaim their past and re-envision their future.

Readers are introduced to key ideas of narrative practice like the externalizing problems – ‘the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem’ -and the concept of “re-membering” one’s life.

4. Narrative Therapy

By Gene Combs, Jill Freedman

For psychotherapy students, teachers, and practitioners, this book describes the clinical application of the growing body of ideas and practices that has come to be known as narrative therapy. Clear and compelling demonstrations of narrative therapy practice, rich in case examples and creative strategies, are at the heart of this book.

5. Treating Survivors of Childhood Abuse and Interpersonal Trauma

By Marylene Cloitre, Lisa R. Cohen, Kile M. Ortigo, Christie Jackson, Karestan C. Koenen

Skills Training in Affective and Interpersonal Regulation (STAIR) Narrative Therapy helps clients to build crucial social and emotional resources for living in the present and to break the hold of traumatic memories. Highly clinician friendly, the book provides everything needed to implement STAIR–including 68 reproducible handouts and session plans–and explains the approach’s theoretical and empirical bases.

6. Solution Focused Narrative Therapy

By Linda Metcalf PhD LPC-S LMFT-S CSC

This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a comprehensive model for effectively blending the two main postmodern brief therapy approaches: solution focused and narrative therapies. It harnesses the power of both models—the strengths-based, problem-solving approach of SFT and the value-honoring and re-descriptive approach of narrative therapy—to offer brief, effective help to clients that builds on their strengths and abilities to envision and craft preferred outcomes.

7. Narrative Exposure Therapy

By Maggie Schauer, Frank Neuner, Thomas Elbert

The new edition of the clearly structured and easy-to-follow NET manual now includes the latest insights and new treatments for dissociation and social pain. The first part of the book describes the theoretical background. The second part shows how to use the NET approach step by step, with practical advice and tools, including how to deal with special issues (such as dealing with challenging moments, defense mechanisms for the therapist, and ethical issues). Appendices include an informed consent form, and checklists for the therapist.

8. Narrative Therapy (Theories of Psychotherapy Series®)

By Stephen Madigan

This second edition of Narrative Therapy includes advice for working with highly conflicted couple relationships; innovative techniques for working with children, youth, and families; updated practice approaches to grief, loss, trauma, and death; ideas for understanding gender and the influence of queer‑informed narrative therapy on identity formation; and the use of narrative therapy in non‑Western cultural contexts.

9. Narrative Therapy in Practice

By Gerald Monk, John Winslade, Kathie Crocket, David Epston

How to apply the definitive postmodern therapeutic technique in a variety of situations, including treating alcoholics, counseling students, treating male sexual abuse survivors, and more. Written with scholarship, energy, practicality, and awareness.

10. Neuro-Narrative Therapy

By Jeffrey Zimmerman

For any therapist working in the area of Narrative Therapy, and for any interested in the emerging understandings that science is bringing to appreciating how our brains develop with and among each other, this book has something to offer. Combining the neuro- and the narrative, as Jeffrey Zimmerman has done here, will create a new direction in Narrative Therapy, one in which our brain and body work together, inviting a more direct and effective engagement with clients.