Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 66
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experience in a dramatic way. In other words, the questions set her up to tell a
dramatic story.
In the example provided above, David is not asking about the problem's
motivations. He is asking, however, about what her perspective suggests about
the course her life may have taken should she have followed the lead of the
problem’s prescriptions. To my way of thinking, this is in service to telling a story
built around narrative tension (Baroni, 2015). This subtle distinction puts LeeMarie in the driver’s seat for how the story is constructed. And affords her the
authority to illustrate, through her own words, what she dramatically navigated at
the age of ten.
2. Questions that orient awareness towards the person’s noble response to the
problem:
1. Is the fact that you are here a testimony to you as a ten-year-old girl and
your mother and father and the family you come from?
2. Is there anything in particular that you would like to appreciate her for,
now that you have 29 years to look back on her life?
3. What was so remarkable about you and the family you come from that
you did so in merely 60 minutes?
These questions ask Lee-Marie to share the details of her lived experience as a
protagonist, acting in concert with some special sets of knowledges, abilities, or
family inheritance in defiance of the problem of anorexia. Once again, David is
asking her to “tell the story of” her 10-year-old self's resistance to the problem
through the filter of her first-person perspective.
Therapy in the narrative mode inquires into the experiences of the problem
through the person's resistance as observed in conversation through the filter of
the first-person perspective. This orientation keeps the client in the “outsider”
position while preserving the client's authorial agency by asking questions only
the client can answer. This puts the clinician in the position of truly asking
questions they don’t know the answers to. The therapy doesn’t ask about general
knowledge or presuppositions that are generally agreed upon. But instead, asks
clients to “fill us in” on the intimate and interesting details of how they came to
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
