ABSTRACT
The importance of the wider social context for awareness of disability following neurological damage has been graphically illustrated by a collection of cross-cultural studies of awareness. A reflection of the definition of awareness in professional discourse is desirable for clinicians working in brain injury. Stories of disputes over accounts of difficulties often have personal significance in terms of people's identities and it is for the reason that they sometimes become ongoing loops of contestation. Relationships between observing self and observed experience, relationships with at times painful feelings that are evoked as part of this, relationships with others in the accounts that are made public, and the dynamics of proxy agreements or contestations that are the stuff of the difference. However, externalizing conversations may have specific value for a family locked into a contesting dynamic about who holds the most accurate account and who are left stuck by the implications of such difference.
