In 2008, shortly before his death, White set up the Adelaide Narrative Therapy Centre to provide counselling services and training workshops relevant to work with individuals, couples, families, groups and communities and to provide a context for exploring recent developments relevant to narrative practice.

White was known for his work with children and Indigenous Aboriginal communities, as well as with schizophrenia, anorexia/bulimia, men's violence, and trauma.

Narrative therapy holds that our identities are shaped by the accounts of our lives found in our stories or narratives. A narrative therapist is interested in helping others fully describe their rich stories and trajectories, modes of living and possibilities associated with them. At the same time, this therapist is interested in co-investigating a problem's many influences, including on the person himself and on their chief relationships.

By focusing on problems' effects on people's lives rather than on problems as inside or part of people, distance is created. This externalization or objectification of a problem makes it easier to investigate and evaluate the problem's influences. Another sort of externalization is likewise possible when people reflect upon and connect with their intentions, values, hopes, and commitments. Once values and hopes have been located in specific life events, they help to re-author or re-story a person's experience and clearly stand as acts of resistance to problems.

The term "narrative" reflects the multi-storied nature of our identities and related meanings. In particular, re-authoring conversations about values and re-membering conversations about key influential people are powerful ways for people to reclaim their lives from problems. In the end, narrative conversations help people clarify for themselves an alternate direction in life to that of the problem, one that comprises a person's values, hopes, and life commitments.

In Narrative therapy a person's beliefs, skills, principles, and knowledge in the end help them regain their life from a problem. In practice a narrative therapist helps clients examine, evaluate, and change their relationship to a problem by acting as an investigative reporter who is not at the centre of the investigation but is nonetheless influential; that is, this therapist poses questions that help people externalize a problem and then thoroughly investigate it. Intertwined with this problem investigation is the uncovering of unique outcomes or exceptions to its influences, exceptions that lead to rich accounts of key values and hopes--in short, a platform of values and principles that provide support during problem influences and later an alternate direction in life.

The narrative therapist, as an investigative reporter, has many options for questions and conversations during a person's effort to regain their life from a problem. These questions might examine how exactly the problem has managed to influence that person's life, including its voice and techniques to make itself stronger. On the other hand, these questions might help restore exceptions to the problem's influences that lead to naming an alternate direction in life. Here the narrative therapist relies that, though a problem may be prevalent and even severe, it has not yet completely destroyed the person. So, there always remains some space for questions about a person's resilient values and related, nearly forgotten events. To help retrieve these events, the narrative therapist may begin a related re-membering conversation about the people who have contributed new knowledges or skills and the difference that has made to someone and vice-versa for the remembered, influential person.

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