You ask her to give the problem a name, and she says it is the Inspector, and then she describes where the Inspector sits at the table and what it says about the gravy. The room relaxes. She has found a way to say the thing at arm's length, and the distance is already doing work. Externalizing conversations in narrative therapy are among the most graceful moves in the field, and a person who has been the problem for thirty years can feel the floor shift when she becomes someone who is being visited by one.
Michael White and David Epston built the practice on the observation that people live inside stories, that dominant stories saturated with a problem crowd out the moments that contradict them, and that therapy can help a person notice those unique outcomes and thicken an alternative account. The stance is generally poststructural. Identity is authored in language and relationship, and the therapist's task is to help a person author it with more of her own hands on the pen.
The path begins from a different premise, and the difference should be stated plainly. It holds that identity is discovered rather than constructed, that a self exists prior to experience and is obscured by interference and not absent. On that premise the work is subtraction, removing what is false until what is present can be recognized, and the word authoring would sit strangely in it. A narrative therapist may reasonably see an essentialist claim here and resist it.
Much remains in common. Both treat an adopted pattern as something taken on and not as the person's nature, and speaking of a mask or a contract as adopted creates the same room that externalizing creates. A moment that contradicts the dominant story can be the first evidence of what a person values, and the path gathers evidence of that kind into a life she can act from. The cultural sources that narrative practice attends to have their counterpart in the contracts a person inherited, and a client can trace them in reflection and bring what she finds to your conversation.
The pairing works best when both the therapist and the path are honest that the two frameworks answer one question differently, whether a self is found or made. A client does not need to resolve it. She can hold both accounts, as many people hold two accounts of a difficult year, and notice which one lets her move. If you prefer that she not receive the discovered account while the story work is under way, that is yours to decide.
The one page brief sets the two frames side by side and marks where they agree.