Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 68
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But the details of lived experience that provide entrance into these unique stories
are often coded as benign and are therefore easily overlooked. So, it is the
responsibility of the outsider, the therapist in this case, to express their interest in
wanting to know how those seeking therapy are actively engaged in responding to
problems by showing curiosity towards those details that show even just an
ounce of story-telling promise.
Thickening the story with animative description: Energizing verbs and a
grammar that holds it all together
Problem stories monopolize the meaning-making authority of the individual they
inhabit. Put another way, successful problems find success by limiting the
spectrum of possibilities for how one might experience what troubles them.
Problem stories survive as problem stories by remaining “thinly known” (White,
2003).
In So You Want To Do Narrative Therapy: Letters to an Aspiring Narrative
Therapist, Sanni Paljakka and Tom Carlson (2024) offer us another way of thinking
about how thinly known accounts of life and lived experience come to govern
how a person makes sense of the circumstances they seek therapy to resolve.
They have introduced the term “Unstory” to delineate the ways dominant ideas
circulated in modern culture disenfranchise a person from their meaning-making
authority. An Unstory is a “labeled account that flattens experience into an
identity conclusion”(Carlson, personal communication, 2026). Tom goes on to
elucidate further:
“I am a failure,” or even “failure is my problem,” doesn’t yet have
narrative form; it has category, judgment, and foreclosure. The same
is true of medicalized descriptions that invite people to understand
themselves as having depression or being anxious — these can
quietly unstory people from the specificity of their lived experience
(Carlson, personal communication, 2026).
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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