JOURNAL
Whose stories get heard: Power, privilege, and narrative dominance
The stories that shape our world aren't chosen at random. Behind every narrative that becomes "common knowledge" lies a complex web of power structures that determine whose experiences get amplified and whose get silenced. Understanding this dynamic isn't just academic—it's essential for anyone seeking to reclaim their own story or support others in doing the same.
Dominant narratives don't spread because they're more true or more important. They spread because they're backed by resources, platforms, and institutional power. A 2023 study by the Reuters Institute found that 68% of news stories quoted sources from positions of institutional authority, while only 14% included perspectives from community members directly affected by the issues being covered.
This pattern repeats across every storytelling medium. In academic research, corporate boardrooms, and therapy offices alike, certain voices are automatically granted credibility while others must fight to be heard. The stories that get told most often aren't necessarily the most accurate—they're the ones told by people with the most access to megaphones.
Research published in the Journal of Social Issues demonstrates that marginalized communities often experience "story theft"—where their experiences are reinterpreted and retold by dominant groups, losing crucial context and meaning in the translation. This isn't just cultural appropriation; it's narrative colonization.
Privilege operates like a storytelling amplifier. It doesn't just make some voices louder—it makes them sound more authoritative, more universal, more "normal." When privileged individuals tell their stories, they're often received as human truths. When marginalized people share similar experiences, they're categorized as "identity issues" or "special interest stories."
Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw's groundbreaking work on intersectionality reveals how multiple forms of marginalization compound to create unique storytelling challenges. People existing at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other identities often find their experiences literally unspeakable within dominant narrative frameworks.
The therapeutic world isn't immune to these dynamics. Traditional psychology has long pathologized responses to oppression, turning survival strategies into symptoms and resilience into disorder. When someone from a marginalized background seeks help, their story often gets filtered through diagnostic categories that were never designed with their reality in mind.
When dominant narratives crowd out other voices, everyone loses access to crucial human wisdom. Indigenous communities worldwide hold sophisticated knowledge about mental health, community healing, and environmental stewardship that has been systematically excluded from mainstream discourse for centuries. These aren't "alternative" perspectives—they represent thousands of years of human insight about thriving in relationship with each other and the natural world.
The absence of diverse stories creates dangerous blind spots. Medical research that primarily studied white male bodies led to misdiagnoses and inadequate treatment for women and people of color for decades. Economic theories developed by wealthy academics failed to account for how policy changes would affect working-class families. Mental health treatments designed around Western individualism often prove inadequate for people from collectivist cultures.
Most personally devastating is what happens to individuals whose stories don't fit dominant templates. They begin to doubt their own experiences, to pathologize their responses to systemic oppression, to seek therapy for being "too sensitive" to racism or "too emotional" about injustice. Their hurt feelings—entirely rational responses to harmful circumstances—get reframed as personal failings rather than evidence of broken systems.
Narrative therapy emerged partly as a response to this dynamic. By positioning clients as experts on their own lives, it directly challenges the assumption that professional knowledge trumps lived experience. Developed by Michael White and David Epston in the 1980s, narrative therapy explicitly acknowledges how dominant cultural stories can colonize individual identity, creating shame and self-blame where anger and action might be more appropriate.
This approach recognizes that many psychological symptoms are actually healthy responses to unhealthy circumstances. When someone feels anxious in environments that consistently devalue their contributions, when they struggle with self-worth after years of systemic discrimination, when they feel depressed while navigating systems that weren't built for their success—these aren't disorders to manage but stories to examine and potentially rewrite.
The power lies not in replacing one expert (the therapist) with another (the client), but in recognizing that different kinds of expertise serve different purposes. Therapists might know about psychological patterns and healing processes, but clients know about their own lives, values, dreams, and the specific contexts that shape their daily reality.
Understanding whose stories get heard is the first step toward changing the dynamic. This doesn't mean that privileged voices should be silenced, but that space needs to be actively created for stories that have been systematically excluded.
In therapy, this might look like asking different questions. Instead of "How can we help you cope with this anxiety?" we might ask "What does this anxiety tell us about the environments you're navigating?" Instead of "Why do you think you're so sensitive?" we could explore "What important values are being violated when you have these strong responses?"
Community-based participatory research models demonstrate how knowledge creation changes when affected communities control the research questions, methods, and interpretation of findings. These approaches consistently reveal insights that top-down research misses entirely, suggesting that our understanding of human experience has been impoverished by narrow narrative control.
The goal isn't to create a hierarchy where previously marginalized stories become the only valid ones. It's to recognize that human experience is vast enough to hold multiple truths simultaneously, and wise enough to benefit from the full range of our collective wisdom.
When people reclaim their narratives, the effects extend far beyond individual healing. Children see new models of what's possible when adults around them refuse to apologize for their experiences. Communities develop stronger responses to systemic challenges when they're not spending energy on self-blame. Social movements gain power when they're built on authentic stories rather than sanitized versions designed to make privileged audiences comfortable.
Research by the Center for Story-Based Strategy shows that social change campaigns succeed at significantly higher rates when they center the stories of people most affected by the issues, rather than relying on statistics and expert analysis alone. Stories create connection and motivation in ways that data cannot.
This doesn't diminish the importance of research, expertise, or institutional knowledge. It suggests that these forms of understanding become more powerful when they're in conversation with lived experience rather than attempting to replace or overshadow it.
Your story matters not because it's unique—though it may be—but because it's yours. In a world that profits from our disconnection from our own experience, reclaiming your narrative is both a personal healing act and a small revolution. The question isn't whether your story deserves to be heard. The question is what becomes possible when you decide to tell it anyway.