Tell Me Your Story
In the pursuit of processing trauma and improving mental health, telling your story is a vital component. It’s so important we have a name for it: Narrative Therapy.
The tale of telling my story began in childhood. The earliest story I remember writing was around age ten. It was a story about my friends and me. It wasn’t factual, but rather the stories and scenarios I made up. I gave myself a different name because I had often been teased about my name. It was a way for that childhood version of myself to begin to explore who I was and who I wanted to be. That story has been lost to time, but I think of it periodically.
Early in my childhood, I was also given a journal. I spent years dutifully and regularly journaling. Most of those early entries were the accountings of day-to-day life of an adolescent me. I’ve gone back and read through some of those journals. For the most part, there are stories of interacting with friends and family. Sometimes, I find stories about my dreams and hopes for my life; occasionally, I find entries full of the kind of righteous indignation that only an angsty teenager can produce. And other times, there are entries filled with the heartache and trauma of fighting to be seen, heard, and understood.
As technology and information exchange evolved, the kind of story telling I engaged in also evolved. The early 2000’s was filled with blogging about being a wife and mother and my stories became tailored for public reading. While I wasn’t quite so raw and vulnerable, those stories are archived and still continue to be cherished.
Around 15 years ago, I experienced trauma and heartache like I had not experienced previously, and I found my story telling evolved again. I started my own therapeutic journey and discovered a safe place in the therapeutic relationship with my counselor to tell the stories I had never been able to tell before. Through the different courses of therapy, I found a strength and relief of sharing the most vulnerable parts of myself. Soon after, I started sharing my story more publicly. I told parts of my story to trusted friends and family. Sometimes, my story was honored and cherished. Sometimes, it wasn’t. In the times that my people sat with me and held space for my grief and pain, I found soul-deep connection and healing that I didn’t know was possible.
I began writing again and this time, it was to tell the deepest and darkest parts of my story. I didn’t know who would read it or if anyone even wanted to read my story. But I wrote it, and people did read it, and then, they began telling me their stories. I discovered a human experience that writers have expressed over and over again. Carl Rogers (the father of person-centered therapy) described it in his book, On Becoming a Person as such: “what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.” Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love expressed in her book Big Magic, that storytelling is both an act of creativity and survival, and quoted the Gospel of Thomas when she said, “Not expressing creativity turns people crazy… ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.’” Audre Lorde, in her essay The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action told us, “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones, said, “In knowing who you are and writing from it, you will help the world by giving it understanding.” I fully believe that there is no human experience so unique that there is not at least one person out there who can understand, empathize, and truly see you. We find those people by telling our stories. And Sue Monk Kidd in Dance of the Dissident Daughter shared her experience of finding community through stories: “…we began to meet regularly to talk about our lives as women… It became a mutual process of self-discovery… Together, over time, we named our lives as women, named our wounds, named our sacred realities. To say it simply, we helped each other.
When I began the last year of my undergraduate degree, I was faced with the decision of what to do post-graduation. Prior to my experiences with devastating trauma, I had been considering getting a PhD in social psychology. After experiencing trauma though, I decided that getting a PhD was no longer an option for the time being. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but I had seen over and over how short and fragile life was, and I needed to consider the time and energy of commitments in a way that I had not needed to before. I had to mourn the loss of that future though, the one in which people called me “Dr.” This was in addition to the many other losses I was facing and had faced. I considered many different education options including teaching, law, art and design, and more. Somewhere along the decision-making process it occurred to me that I had spent so much of my life focused on stories. I had fallen in love with the human experience and all the stories that make up who and what we are.
I had embedded deep within my own personal theory on happiness and fulfillment the idea that all of these people had described: Our stories are important. The answer for what I wanted to do with my life, what I would be good at, and what I would enjoy day in and day out, was facilitating others in telling their stories. The therapeutic process can look so many different ways. What I have experienced myself and seen over and over again, is that healing and strength happen through the process of telling your story – whatever that story may be.
