Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 62
61
narrative mode encourages helpers to ask questions that build along the margins
of what is known, such that opportunities for rich story development might be
spotted, exposed, and tended to. Narrative therapists are eager to ask about
strange and anomalous story details that highlight a person’s struggles for selfrealization, hope, desire, or longing. Questions such as these might anticipate a
“special knowledge” (Epston, 2018) that was relied upon during ordinary and
mundane moments of life.
Though our questions are important, it is the answers they generate that matter
most in therapy. To ensure the conversation maintains the focus on the
experience of the client as the primary source from which therapy draws, asking
questions that invite the client to “look again” with different eyes encourages
their participation in therapy as having the “important half” (Epston, 2018) of the
knowledge central to the therapeutic endeavor. Therefore, to maintain an
orientation towards experiences that thickens the story, narrative therapists ask
questions that invite clients to maintain a first-person perspective while standing
outside of the story being told.
While operating in the narrative mode, questions focus less on the ideas a person
has about how life ought to go and instead invite a person to build knowledge
along the border between what they know they’ve experienced and what may
still be experienceable. We are asking them to investigate their experience and
retrieve something different. This is a difficult task without the aid of an outsider,
a therapist, who can stand outside of the story being shared, inviting the client to
stand alongside them to account for what might be difficult to see through the
already-established view of lived experience. Having a way for someone to tell of
their experience again as an author, with agency over how the story might be
told, requires a kind of stepping outside of the story being re-viewed.
Outsight: Seeing one’s self from the outside
Tom Carlson (2020) offers us an important theoretical framework that could be
considered a significant leap forward in how to conceptualize the notion of
“witnessing”. Tom tasked himself with looking into the theory that drove much of
Animative Descriptions and Vivifying Discovery: Inviting Clients Into The Marvel Of Their Understory
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2026 Release, p. 52-79.
www.journalnft.com
