A communication dynamic in which one person repeatedly scrutinizes, reframes, or challenges another person's account of their own experiences in ways that diminish that person's agency over their own story. Narrative auditing can become harmful when it prioritizes external interpretation over a person's lived experience and is used to
pressure them into adopting someone else's version of events.
Unlike healthy questioning—which seeks understanding through curiosity and mutual
respect—harmful narrative auditing attempts to redefine another person's identity, memories, motives, emotions, or
reality without their
consent or meaningful participation.
Characteristics:
Repeatedly insisting someone else's interpretation is more
valid than the person's own account.
Dismissing or minimizing lived experience without genuine inquiry.
Framing disagreement as evidence that the other person cannot accurately understand themselves.
Using authority, status, or social pressure to shape another person's self-narrative.
Replacing dialogue with correction or coercive reinterpretation.
Healthy
Alternative: Narrative Witnessing
Listening with curiosity, asking clarifying questions, acknowledging uncertainty, and recognizing that people are generally the primary interpreters of their own lived experiences while remaining
open to respectful dialogue and
new information.
Narrative Auditing is a tactic often used by patriarchal
power structures, including patriarchal agents, to attemt to have others self-abandon their own
truth. It is an abuse tactic used to wield power over the valitidity and
truth of the experience of abuse through coercion.
