Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 61
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alluring, etc.) enough to inform and therefore alter the current relational
formations between people in the family. In other words, when a family gets into
the business of addressing problems, if all they focus on are the bird shit falling
from the sky making a mess of things, they will have trouble seeing the rare,
reality-changing discoveries hidden in plain sight.
But encouraging a closed-off family system to make new meaning of potentially
newsworthy information requires more than happenstance and good luck.
Therapy must alert a family or an individual to the potential for what might be
discoverable and therefore story-able. The therapy must spot potential entry
points into alternative accounts of history by listening for the contradictions in
the story, like hairline cracks in a mirror, and use language and grammar that
vivifies interest to open gaps where new meaning can be collectively made by the
family system, therapist, and anyone else involved. In some cases, the therapy
must stop the conversation and ask, “You’ve been telling me of this, but can I
bother you to take up an ounce of interest in that over there?”
Questions that position the conversation as a first-person accounting
Most modern therapies orient a professional’s listening skills towards a
symptoms-as-explanations model. Clinicians today are taught to be experts at
spotting and classifying life dysfunction, social, executive, or processing deficits,
and or any manner of skill or knowledge deficits. Professionals are taught that
their responsibility is to be discerning of “medically” relevant dysfunction; to
listen in the scientific mode. These dysfunctions are discerned against a backdrop
of what is often deemed healthy or “normal”. This isn’t to say this type of
listening is inherently ineffective or wrong. But it is to say that orienting your
therapeutic ear towards spotting and exposing deficits will have you listening in a
very specific way. But unlike most modern helping traditions, narrative therapists
are trained to listen and respond in the narrative mode.
Listening to someone’s complaints in the narrative mode bends the listening ear
away from details that reveal distinctions in deficits and towards something
different; details that suggest a potential for moral agency. Listening in the
Animative Descriptions and Vivifying Discovery: Inviting Clients Into The Marvel Of Their Understory
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2026 Release, p. 52-79.
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