This book represents a respectful, often playful approach to serious problems, with groundbreaking theory as a backup. The authors start with the assumption that people experience problems when the stories of their lives, as they or others have invented them, do not sufficiently represent their lived experience. Therapy then becomes a process of storying or restorying the lives and experiences of these people. In this way, narrative comes to play a central role in therapy. Michael White, drawing upon the theories of Michel Foucault, presents therapy as an inevitably political practice that can separate individuals from subjugating "truth" discourses and make space for alternative knowledges. White's idea of "externalizing the problem" is a major theoretical and clinical innovation in family therapy. Once the problem is clearly separated from the person, one can look at the interaction of people and problems, asking such crucial questions as: Is the problem gaining more influence over the person or is the person gaining more influence over the problem? Both authors share delightful examples of a storied therapy that privileges a person's lived experience, inviting a reflexive posture and encouraging a sense of authorship and reauthorship of one's experiences and relationships in the telling and retelling of one's story. In this therapy, narrative form, documents, and certificates in particular become the means by which the person redefines their relationship with the problem.

Letters are used to invite family members to ally against an oppressive trauma, to inform all those concerned about a child's victory over mischief, to summarize therapeutic progress and to predict future success, to celebrate the taming of fears, to declare independence from the tyranny of homework-in short, to externalize, raise questions about, and gain both power and knowledge over problems. Thus, narrative means lead to therapeutic-and liberating-ends.