Coercive narrative manipulates others into accepting a dominant story.

Devices for enforcing narrative control often go unnoticed.

Coercive narrative devices include styles of delivery, threatening rebuttals, and conversation closers.

Gaslighting, whereby someone undermines our belief in our own experiences, is now a familiar term, while other hurdles to personal knowledge have been overlooked. One of these is coercive narrative, whereby devices are used to ensure we accept a dominant version of a person and their motives or of events and their causes.

In the past decade or so, I, like many others, have become increasingly sensitive to ways our own stories about what is happening in our lives are drowned out by loud narratives—not because they are lyrically persuasive or convincing but because they hedge their position with silencers or signals that of disapproval and contempt and confusion. Coercive narrative is not simply a fixed personal belief; it inflicts a fixed story on others. The "story" can be specific—about an individual person or event or process—or it can be more general about how the world "really" is or works.

One way to resist controlling narratives is to identify common techniques used to enforce them.

First, we can spot delivery techniques that secure speech time through body........

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