# Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20241 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20241/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08441/) (2020)
- [SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00273/) (2023)
- [PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01702/) (2021)
- [CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16433/) (2024)
- [Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00870/) (2024)
- [Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15787/) (2024)
- [PsyDT: Using LLMs to Construct the Digital Twin of Psychological Counselor with Personalized Counseling Style for Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13660/) (2024)
- [Reimagining Support: Exploring Autistic Individuals' Visions for AI in Coping with Negative Self-Talk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17504/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Responsible Evaluation of AI for Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00065/) (2026)
- [When AI Takes the Couch: Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04124/) (2025)
- [From Pattern Recognizers to Personalized Companions: A Survey of Large Language Models in Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25186/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for mental health support, yet current approaches lack realism in simulating specialized psychotherapy and fail to capture therapeutic progression over time. Narrative therapy, which helps individuals transform problematic life stories into empowering alternatives, remains underutilized due to limited access and social stigma. We address these limitations through a comprehensive framework with two core components. First, INT (Interactive Narrative Therapist) simulates expert narrative therapists by planning therapeutic stages, guiding reflection levels, and generating contextually appropriate expert-like responses. Second, IMA (Innovative Moment Assessment) provides a therapy-centric evaluation method that quantifies effectiveness by tracking "Innovative Moments" (IMs), critical narrative shifts in client speech signaling therapy progress. Experimental results on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants reveal that INT consistently outperforms standard LLMs in therapeutic quality and depth. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of INT in synthesizing high-quality support conversations to facilitate social applications.