Follow Your Imagination into the Larger Life!

The Age of Play

Paul Klee, "Love"

HOW TO SET THE STAGE FOR A CREATIVE AND COMPASSIONATE LIFE

Living happily and successfully requires a rich fantasy life, the ability to imagine alternative realities, and the capacity to soothe ourselves using internal resources when life is filled with stress and conflict. In other words, fantasy is the key to dealing effectively with reality. 

       Nourishing the imagination, teaching a child about life in the way that child thinks rather than as an adult thinks, creates the foundation for learning, acting effectively, imagining how another person feels, and developing the self-esteem gained by believing in their capacity to handle whatever life brings. 

 

        According to a paradigm established by developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, every stage of childhood has its own tasks, and each stage is critical to integrated psychological, physical, and capacity development. The age of play could be described, however, as a quantum leap out of infancy into childhood. By the age of three, our personality, with its gifts and needs, is beginning to take shape as we learn to master not just our own bodies, but the world around us. 

"Are my gifts valued and worth supporting, or should I hide them away?"

        This is the great dramatic question a child must answer, once he or she knows they’re capable of taking care of themselves and are preparing to step forth out of the cocoon of family into the next threshold of life: school. 

        Can you remember how much courage it took to enter that first day of pre-kindergarten? No, probably not directly. But you may experience that same fear of the unknown, and of your own capacities to deal with it when you try to undertake something new in your adult life: going to a social event for the first time as a widow or widower, getting back into the dating game after a divorce, applying for jobs after losing your previous one, going to networking meetings, giving public presentations, pitching a book to an agent. The root of our confidence or lack of it very likely can be found in this early stage of life.

The work of a child is play. Play is a child’s vocabulary, a child’s way of figuring out the world, what goes up, what falls down, what is safe, what is not, what is edible. Almost from an infant’s first days, he or she plays. The mobile hanging over the crib, the fuzzy stuffed animals at the foot of the crib, the rubber ball in the mouth, the buttons on mother’s blouse, grabbing, suckling, jingling keys and laughing joyously at the sound they have the power to make.

The work of a parent is to gradually create a new kind of holding environment from the ones of earlier phases. Not the physical holding, or even the steadying and protective hovering as a toddler begins to walk. This is the holding environment that allows a child to play, to share with other children, to experience the first manifestations of empathy, the ability to imagine oneself into the life of another.

According to Erikson, about the age of three to five we get really serious about our play. During this period we experience a desire to copy the adults around us and take initiative in creating play situations. Note: I’m talking about non-competitive, unstructured play. Not soccer games, ballet lessons, or formal play dates that put pressure on a child to perform well rather than explore with glee. We make up stories with dolls, stuffed animals, toy phones and miniature cars, playing out roles in a trial universe, experimenting with the blueprint for what we believe it means to be an adult. We try out our abilities to dance, draw, make up stories, explore our fantasy life, test it against the reality of our family. We present plays. We also begin to use those critical words for exploring the world—What if?  In this pre-school stage, when we are preparing to step into the world of kindergarten, we play out roles in a trial universe, experimenting with the blueprint for what we believe it means to be an older child and even an adult. We are like the emerging butterfly, beginning to pump blood into our wings.

As we play, we are developing the ability to plan in preparation for rudimentary goal achievement. We’re learning, through play, how to master our world. If we receive the support we need, our play evolves naturally into a sense of purpose.

Unfortunately, this is where all too many children are stuck and their creativity stunted -- when so many people become frozen, their burgeoning individual voice silenced, and their inner life is starved to near death. 

As we know all too well, if emerging life force is blocked in one direction, it will flow into another. Some years ago, I was shocked by young men in a diversion from incarceration program, who demonstrated no imagination beyond the narrative of their prevailing gang culture. Asked to draw self-portraits, everyone drew either a grave or hands holding onto bars. “I’ll be dead before I’m 21,” said one youth in response to a question about what kind of life he envisioned for himself as an adult. The violent environment of family, plus violent coaching from older uncles, brothers, neighbors, led to their inability to concentrate in school, with its predictable spiraling down and falling out of the rest of the human race.

 

What’s Your Age of Play Story?

Were you told fairy tales as a child? If so, you were lucky. Bruno Bettleheim, author of The Uses of Enchantment, wrote that it’s at this age that fairy tale is most resonant with children. We’re ready to learn about life’s realities, but in a way that matches our vocabulary and the way we as children think. For instance, a child will ask to be told the same fairy tale over and over because it is solving some inner puzzle that the child can’t articulate. When that problem is resolved, the child is ready to hear and absorb a new story.

1. What fairy tales, movies, TV shows stand out for you in childhood? What did you like about them? What character stood out? If you can’t remember, imagine.
2. What dramas did you like to act out as a very young child? A tea party? A pilot? (I was a ballerina, president, pilot (never a flight attendant mind you, but always at the controls of a jet, not a big lumbering passenger plane. Interesting that I fear flying as a grownup!)
3. What do you do to play now? Do you see patterns in what you did then and how you play now? Did those playful games become a root of passion or were they shut down before they evolved into real gifts and purpose?
4. What makes you gleeful and how can you bring more of it into your life now? 
5. Finally, who supports your gifts? What situations say yes, they're valued? Which do not? In reality, we will always be faced with obstacles and individuals who cannot see our gifts or don't want them. Being conscious and making intelligent choices is what is asked of us.

The power of expressive modalities--especially metaphor--is in being able to access and fill unmet needs of that inner three-year-old. 

It's said that the shortest distance between two beings is a laugh.

All Rights Reserved. Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. 2018, from my forthcoming book, A Write of Passage, Chapter 4, Reawakening the Magic

This is the third question of life. The first, "Am I Safe," is the subject of a May 2011 blog post. The second is found in September 2011: "Finding Your Tribe." The second question of life is "Can I get my needs met?" These questions replay throughout life, as we confront its challenges. When we are stuck in adulthood, chances are we are dealing with an unresolved question from childhood.

 

The Firebird: Exploring Depression as Transformational Ground

I'm looking forward to presenting this talk and telling one of my favorite tales on Oct.2 at the Jung Foundation/NYC! So powerful to me is the metaphor of the Firebird and the resilience it represents that I've made it my cover photo on Facebook, and it will soon be the image on the home page of my updated website, when I can get to that big job!

Depression and anxiety are the twin maladies of our time. The Centers for Disease Control predict that by 2020, over 80% of women will have experienced depression. Beneath the roots of depression and anxiety in our personal lives, many depth psychologists believe these miseries are a reflection of the violence and destruction taking place throughout our nation and world, including to our earth itself and its beautiful peoples.

Traditional cultures understood depression and other non-ordinary mental experiences as states of emergence rather than as disorders. I follow the path of story, as these wise ones did, to transmute sorrow, anger, and fear into life-affirming attitudes and choices in the real world.

This experiential presentation helps you take a fresh and creative approach to depression through the rich metaphors, visual images, characters, environments, and heroic plot of a famous Russian folk tale.

To view the announcement on the Jung Foundation website: http://www.cgjungny.org/forums.html#bruce

"Thank you for your wonderful Firebird presentation. Looking at depression through a story lens was useful. Definitely useful." -- from The Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute, presented on May 8, 2014.

THE GRAIL IN YOUR LIFE

Image found on Age-of-America

A young man was married to a woman struggling with drug addiction. She was unable to care for their infant son, he worked on a construction site all day, and his family was in another state. One night in the midst of a terrible fight, he looked in his son's crib and saw that the baby was shaking. In desperation, carrying his child, the following night he went to a support group for people living with a family member's addiction. Beyond all rational explanation, he began to feel hope, and even more surprising, he got the idea to take his baby to work. The foreman's wife set up a tiny nursery in the management shed and other women came in to help. The young man began to experience kindness in people he had never before known.

A woman with Stage IV cancer diagnosis walked along a beach contemplating suicide. When a starfish with a broken point scurried up the sand to catch a wave, she recognized the presence of the grail. She chose to live, and to live well. To her his meant taking the necessary care of herself and sharing her journey with others. She bought a starfish pin and wore it near her heart to remind herself that she had learned the lesson of love from a starfish.

A community was bereft when a beloved neighbor, a firefighter, died on 9/11. One night at a community meeting, the discussion inspired a novel idea: he was a gardener and to memorialize him, they would build a community in their small park. Today, "Pete's Garden" blooms with annuals and perennials in the summer and is stays green with pines in the winter; people relax on the benches, and strangers became forever friends. 

These are the grail moments--the small or huge insights, ideas, and openings that shift our reality, heal our suffering, and transform our lives. The grail is life itself.

THE LEGEND OF THE GRAIL

The Holy Grail was the chalice use to collect Christ's blood from where he hung on the cross, and it was buried with him. When his tomb was opened three days later, both the living Christ and the grail were gone.

Over the centuries, the grail has come to symbolize that which heals all wounds. Less an object than a shift of mind, the grail represents the moment when a small life opens up to a greater reality in which we live but rarely see. These are the moments when we receive help from a more than human source, when we feel fully alive and flowing with life, and as a result are enabled to take inspired, life-generating action. You don't have to believe in a god to experience these transcendent moments; the imagination will do.

I have found that the old stories passed down among generations contain the healing we so long for now in our personal and collective lives. The great teacher Jean Houston observes in A Mythic Life that the Arthurian legend of Parsifal can show us how to transform modern breakdown into breakthrough.  

Found on DeviantArt

Parsifal was a young and untested knight (the name Parsifal can be translated as fool or innocent) who finds himself in a wasteland where everything was crumbling and all living things were dying -- flowers no longer bloomed, rivers had dried up, animals and people were sick in body and spirit. This was the kingdom of the Fisher King, a monarch who suffered from an unknown illness caused by a wound in his leg; his illness had infected the land and no one knew how to cure it. 

Directed to a castle that suddenly manifested within a mist, that night Parsifal saw a magnificent chalice, glowing brighter than all the candles in the hall, being carried back and forth by a beautiful young woman. This chalice was the Holy Grail. Throughout the ages, the Grail became known as the container of the life force that healed all wounds. Parsifal vowed to find out the secret of the Grail the next day. But when he woke up the following morning, the castle was empty; there was not a soul around to ask. Seized with fear, Parsifal jumped on this horse and rode back across the drawbridge just as it was rising and the castle was becoming enshrouded in mist.

For many years after that, Parsifal wandered in a dark forest, trying to find his way back to the Grail Castle by sorting through the tangled roots. During this time, he had many adventures, but he lived without passion, longing for the joy he had felt for one night, in what seemed to be a dream. But these years were not really about loss; they forced the knight to go on an inner journey as well as an outer one. What he lost was his innocence, naivete, and his unconsciousness. What he gained was simplicity, clarity, and maturity. Like a blade, he was sharpened in the fire of adversity. 

Finally, one day he asked a simple question: “Where is the grail? Whom should it serve?”

With that question, life opened: the earth turned green, waters flowed, the drawbridge to the Grail Castle lowered, the ailing Fisher King was healed, and the kingdom too was restored to health. The Grail was brought out of the castle to serve the world.

The message of the grail legend is that healing is possible. We heal as we serve. 

One path to our own Grail is to discover our deep story and share it with caring others. At the same time, as the myth tells us, we begin the healing of our broken land.

Ask Yourself:

1. How does the Parsifal myth translate into your experience? Write yourself into the myth to find your own grail path. Play with it: rewrite the myth from the different perspectives of Parsifal, the ailing king, the Grail itself, and the land -- both in its dying time and in its rebirth. 

2. What is the question you need to ask? Try a few on the page and see where they lead.

3. A story isn't over until it is told. Share your transforming insight, if you have one, no matter how small and insignificant it may seem, with someone who cares.

4. What do you take from this exercise? What needs to happen? And what is the smallest, least difficult step you can take into a larger life? 

A new path beckons. One in which you are not alone, but now part of a life-giving grid of fellow seekers of their own Grails.



All rights reserved, Juliet Bruce, 2018. Excerpt from book in progress.

FIERCE PRACTICE: FACING UP TO THE TERRORISTS WITHOUT AND WITHIN

A PLOT FOR OUR TIME

This post is about the really hard stuff, which we have to face if we're going to move forward in truth--collectively and in our personal lives. 
            The 2012 film, “The Attack,” directed by Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueri haunts me still. It is a tragic quest tale in a contemporary setting, concerning the painful modern issues with which we are so familiar. The object of the quest is an answer to the questions we routinely ask in the face of evil: Who was this person, and how could they do this? And the next equally terrifying question: Am I complicit?

            The film’s protagonist, Amin, is a highly successful and assimilated Arab surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, well loved by his Jewish colleagues. His privileged world is shattered when a suicide bombing kills 17 children at a birthday party in a popular café. Horrifically, the bomber turns out to be his own wife. Once released from police interrogation and the shock worn off, he decides to discover the truth about this woman Sihem, with whom he had shared a loving marriage—or so he thought—for 15 years. His quest is a classic heroic journey plot that takes him away from the white buildings and orderly avenues of Tel Aviv to the ancient, teeming village of Nablus on the West Bank.

            Ever deeper and higher he climbs through the old stone streets; through shocking conversations with his relatives, who express pride in Sihem’s martyrdom; through being tossed out of a local mosque by men who are enraged with this secular Arab’s violation of their sanctuary; until he finally ascends the steps of a church where he confronts the radical cleric who was Sihem’s mentor. Cold and implacable as he lights candles for the evening service, the priest tells Amin, “Your trip here is a waste of time. I have nothing to say to you. We have nothing to discuss.”

            “The Attack” is not a political film. It is an impassioned but even-handed exploration of what happens when a population is subjugated, left powerless and voiceless, and in thrall to a charismatic leader who exploits their hatred for the oppressive system.

            Following this encounter, one truth after another emerges as Amin discovers that not only was his own nephew part of the plot, but that the Tel Aviv cell used his own apartment for planning sessions while he was at his hospital. At the end of this heart-wrenching encounter, his nephew hands him a video of his wife’s last moments.

            Watching it, he sees that Sihem tried to call him before she left on her mission. Unable to speak with him, she wept and called his name. He is left not with a why, but with the knowledge that there was humanity in this woman after all: she betrayed him and she loved him. Amin becomes a man in possession of a more terrible truth: his unknowing complicity in this crime through his blind self-absorption in his career. Tragically, he ends his quest as a divided soul, belonging nowhere in his bifurcated world. We last see him in flashback, standing at the bus station where he dropped Sihem off for what he thought was a trip to see her grandfather. “Every time you leave, I die a little,” he says. Amin’s entire life and identity has died.

The film is built around everything that makes story a powerful vehicle of self-expression in chaotic times: it holds the ambiguity of reality, the both/and over the either/or view of life. Later, at a café across the street from New York’s famed cultural complex, Lincoln Center, in a neighborhood much like the bombed-out Tel Aviv streets in the film, I sat with a friend pondering the questions the film doesn’t answer: How could he not know? Where will it all end? We ended our conversation hours later with our personal memories of betrayal and questioning our own complicity in our country’s oppression and war-mongering. 

FIERCE PRACTICE: GIVING SAFE VOICE TO THE MONSTER

I returned home in a self-reflective mood. My life as an adult has been dedicated to peace; in my work I create safe environments—I call them “story sanctuaries”—where through writing, sharing and listening, people are able to create coherent inner lives and warm, resonant relationships with others.

            Yet, when I sat down to write in my journal and on impulse rewrote Amin’s meeting with the radical cleric, taking the role of the priest, the language of hatred and contempt for the privileged and unconscious visitor who violated my space flowed easily. Perhaps it came from my anger and disgust with the U.Ss government for which I was writing propaganda to pay my bills, or perhaps my deep well of anger came from trying to thrive as a member of the #MeToo generation and a woman in a male-dominated journalism industry, or from the forgotten adults who had dismissed me as a girl child, the layers and layers of disgust that had piled up over a lifetime. Whatever its roots, I realized that I had the potential for rage within me, just as you might—more than even I knew, even with the many years of healing work, especially forgiveness, I had done on myself since a serious depression in 1989.

            Giving expression to those walled off feelings opened the channel to a wellspring of emotions and memories that I had erased from conscious memory. Feeling the pain while writing in the metaphor of a terrorist, which I was unable to feel when writing in my familiar voice, was at first a relief and then liberation into a deeper vulnerability and love for myself and others. I felt emboldened by my writing, as I always do when I spill the truths that only my writing voice knows and reveals through the metaphors of character, place and plot of story. I subsequently became conscious of the almost imperceptible hints of this shadow reality in my daily life: the aversion I felt so easily and the way I cut off people who I perceived had hurt me, the subtle ways in which I tended to narrow my life to an aloof existence up a long flight of stairs—as disconnected from visceral inner pain as from my neighbors.

ON YOUR PATH OF TRUTH

            My point in sharing this experience with you is to assure you that you are not alone in harboring unacceptable feelings. All of us tend to suppress the unwanted figures in our psyche, much like the oppressor country in the film locks up the displaced people in refugee camps outside its declared borders, only to reap the violent results of violent denial in times of change, when we are stripped of our defenses, much like the naked trees, stripped of leaves, reveal their essential shapes in winter. The truth is, we cannot move forward wholeheartedly toward a happier future until we make that hard journey to the abode of our inner monsters.

            When we invite a better life for self and world, we meet old selves that once upon a time were hurt or crumpled, and that remain as frozen places in body, mind, and spirit  in ourselves, and regressive attitudes and actions in the world, such as falling in thrall to Destroyers who pass themselves off as leaders. These unconscious, icy selves keep us stuck in, old stories that no longer serve. The work of emergence becomes to welcome these uninvited members back to the story fire, listen to their stories without being pulled into reliving them, and hold their space within the circle until they can absorb the warmth of fully aligned living. We are left with a raw heart, but no longer the demonizing story that has damaged people and planet collectively and crippled our individual lives and sabotages our dreams.
     Ask yourself:

• What is trying to emerge here?
• What is being asked of me?

       The next time you are waylaid by a monster in your outer or inner life, know that you are coming close to your highest possibility; you are being awakened to the fact that your perspective is too narrow. The monsters without and within are in reality agents of destiny--challenging us to stay with it, preparing us to break through to a deeper self and higher reality.

         The ancient tellers and shamans understood that hearts break not to suffer but to open to a deeper and more numinous stream of life. The stand-out moment in a story, the strangest part of a dream, or a series of coincidences can be a sign for the truth that is struggling to emerge. “One thing that comes out in the myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation,” Joseph Campbell said to Bill Moyers in their conversations on the power of myth. “The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”[1]

            Know that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be right now on your unique path.           

            Here, in this place of utmost difficulty, you will find your grail.

[1]Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. 44.

© Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. 2018, Excerpt from forthcoming book

NEXT STORY SANCTUARY: LIFE THROUGH A HEALING STORY LENS

VIA 4 Powerful Ways to Use Storytelling LIFE THROUGH A HEALING STORY LENS

Monday, July 16 8-9:30 eastern Free and online The one gift I can see in these horrific times is the emergence of powerful healing communities at the grassroots and global levels. We are taking our destinies out of the hands of a government that doesn't care about the people and entrusting them to small communities of people who do care -- both locally and globally through the wonders of the internet. These Story Sanctuaries are intended to be a place for building a grid of deeply caring people and communities. To me, there's no more powerful way to build community than to sharing our stories. Story (an artistic re-imagining of our lives) offers both a narrative through-line moving ever forward like a river to the sea, and a great maternal container that holds all of life in a moment -- light, shadow, yearning, resisting, external obstacles, looking forward, looking back, and being grounded in the present. Whether you are interested in writing your story or living through it resiliently, this session will focus on deconstructing and reconstructing the moments you are living into an emerging through-line that can bring you home to your calm center. These groups are small and people have begun registering for this one. To register, please write julietbrucephd@gmail.com. I will send you my Zoom Room link a few days before. Image: via 4 Powerful Ways to Use the Art of Storytelling

ROW BEYOND THE ROCKS My book in progress: A Write of Passage: In the Darkness, a Story Path Home Authors Guild Website: The Story Zone "Everything is clear now: why I had to go there, why things happened the way they did, what I learned and how I changed. But at the beginning of this tale, on a sun-burnished September day in 1994, I stood before a locked iron door to a maximum security unit for criminally insane male inmates–killers, rapists, kidnappers and burglars declared not guilty by reason of insanity, and incarcerated here until at some undetermined date they were deemed safe to return to the community. The door held a peculiar message. Once upon a time, it had read "Welcome to Ward 10," in contac paper letters attached just below the barred window. By the time I arrived, the "l" had fallen out and faded blue letters spelled, "We come to Ward 10." I noted it with some unease, but followed my escort with a spirit of adventure over the threshold into the unit." ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, Juliet Bruce, PhD, 2018.

WANT TO WORK PRIVATELY WITH ME OR BOOK A TALK OR STORY SANCTUARY FOR YOUR GROUP? I am available for professional trainings, community, family, and individual sessions. Please visit my Living Story practice website for more information on content and fees. Living Story I will be giving a talk at the Jung Institute/NYC on "The Firebird: Exploring Depression as Transformational Ground through Story" on Oct. 2, 12:30-1:30.

"URGENT CARE" STORY SANCTUARY TO MAINTAIN EQUANIMITY IN CRISIS TIMES

Sunday, June 24,
Noon -1 eastern
Free and online

Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I calm my mind.
May I be balanced.
May I be at peace.

Every day a new crisis, a new outrage. Many of us feel distraught and distracted in the face of terrible events.This nightmare will eventually end one way or another, but we have a hard struggle ahead, as things will likely get worse in the coming weeks and months. We're in this for the long haul, yes?
This weekend, I am offering an "Urgent Care" Story Sanctuary. My intention is to help all of us stay balanced through wise community so that we can continue to meet our own responsibilities without denying reality, and to take action, if moved to do so, from a place of calm abiding.

Please feel welcome to join, to listen, to share, to come sleepy-eyed. Bring your coffee, your cat. Wear your jammies.

Just sign up. julietbrucephd at gmail dot com.


Photo: lotus field.via FB/Just Lovely

WHEN A STORY ARRIVES

Mosaic at Sheridan Square

In many years of facilitating healthy change through storymaking, I have observed that when we can translate our raw experience into a story, something remarkable and unexplainable in rational terms happens: a deeply transformational process is set into motion.

We feel the presence of a story by the quality of greater presence and attention it brings. A story often begins to tell itself. As a teller, something stronger than intellect is directing our words. As a listener, we understand intuitively that someone is sharing something important with us—a moment that may have changed the arc of their life. 

When a story arrives, we stop speaking in concepts (For example: “I habitually lie to my wife for no reason because I learned as a child that lying saved me from my father’s rage.”) These concepts are important in understanding intellectually the path to self-sabotaging behaviors. But they’re not experiential; therefore not transformational. In transformational story, we're not looking for "facts" as much as we're hoping to untangle emotional knots that keep us frozen.

             

When story takes over, we slow down, begin to speak from our senses, within a concrete setting and time, communicating an emotional quality, repeating significant dialogue, possibly surprised by forgotten details, in which we feel the emotions we weren’t able to feel when the event happened, but buffered and released, as in what happens when we watch a good film or read an engaging novel. For example, here’s the story that might arise:

“One time, I was about nine, I opened a bottle of Dewar’s that my father kept in the bar in the den, and I took a sip. It was awful! Bitter. Why did anyone drink this stuff? I remember the TV was turned on to some after-school program. I hated the program and the Scotch and decided never to do either again. When my father got home from work and saw the torn label, he yelled, “Who did this?” I knew he would beat up the guilty party because he always did. So I lied and said it was my older brother and his friends. It was easy to blame Eddie because he was always getting into trouble and our father didn’t believe his denials. He was the one who got beat that time.”

Untold, we may reenact that lie that saved us over and over, like re-listening to a garbled voice mail to understand the message. Fully told, we are released from that freeze frame that has blocked the flow of our life force around the issue of truth for decades. There’s no longer a need to reenact it. 

Our listener feels the shift in energy as well, and inevitably resonates with their own emotional associations. Story enables catharsis, emotional detox, and liberation for everyone.
 

In storymaking, we give ourselves permission to play with memory. We might create a “What if?” tale to give that little boy in the story what he really needed: a sense of safety around his father. What if a dad swims out to rescue his son who has paddled too far into the lake, wraps one strong arm around his precious child, and swims with the other arm back to shallow water? Not only does this tale inject parental safety into that painful memory, changing the neural pathway that held it; it triggers a new emotional state, and launches the limitless possibilities of a new story. 

If you feel caught in old behavior or relationship patterns, it’s likely that you’re stuck in such a story. You will likely find, as a client of mine did after telling a similar story, that the compulsive need to lie has dissolved. That story is over.

Try This

Reporting facts as they happened chronologically. (“He said, then I said, so he said…”) is not a story. In fact, it can shut down your listener’s receptivity and your own emotional engagement in what you’re saying.

Teller: Tell the situation as you remember it. In three minutes, describe a problematic situation with a trusted friend, therapist, or life coach. Think: context or problem, your usual response, the usual outcome. Compressing time this way forces you to get to the “bones” or essentials of your story.

Listener(s): Listen! The greatest gift you can give someone is to hold space for them while they process for themselves what they said out loud. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh once said the most healing thing we can say to someone grappling with a problem or strong emotion is, “Friend, I hear you.” (This also holds true as well for listening to our inner voices. Respond with empathy and the strong emotion will soften and become quieter.)

Teller: Now describe the  as a situation as a scene or master shot, as if you are watching a movie.  Giving yourself another three minutes, ground your story in a setting, with people, describe how the problem manifest in concrete terms, what you did, and the outcome. You’re improving here. Forget about doing it “right.” Just say what comes. When it gives you an ending—and it will—give it a title that captures the feeling you have about it. A title is like the ca-ching of a cash register; it concludes the transaction. In story terminology, it frames the experience and establishes your authorship, and thus your authority, over the circumstances. This is how you become the storyteller of your evolving life.

Listener(s): What stands out for you? Do not interpret, analyze, intellectualize, or give advice. All worthy responses, but a different kind of process from story. Above all, don’t impose your own meanings and solutions, no matter how well-intended. Story medicine is based on emergence: the knowledge that each person intuitively knows is right for them and our role as listener is to help them gain access to it. Respond with what you heard, and what had resonance for you.

Each of you: What do you each take from this exchange? You have engaged in dynamic, direct sensory experience together, rather than a retelling of a problem. Now you can discuss it in your usual roles as friends or client/counselor as usual. 

What do you now see that you didn’t see before? 

Do you have a new idea for what to do about the issue? 

Transformation doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. Life changes incrementally when we think or do one small thing differently. 

I call it a Grail Moment.

© 2018, Juliet Bruce, Ph.D., from the appendix of my forthcoming book, "A Write of Passage: In the Darkness, a Story Path Home."

HOW CAN WE HELP THE CHILDREN? GIVING TROUBLED KIDS A BETTER STORY

This re-post from some years ago seems relevant these days. It may be especially so for teachers, counselors, and other community professionals who work with frightened and at-risk young people.

Last week-end an art therapist posted the following message on a creative arts listserv to which I belong:

I am running a group for 6 students in 3rd grade who have behavior problems and aggression. I found that for the first group, the rules were consistently broken, even when reinforced and warnings were given. I spent so much time on just trying to get the students to be quiet when someone else was talking, take turns, ask for materials rather than grab them from another student, sit in their chair, not name call, tease or swear, that there was little time to focus on the artwork. Any advice on things that will work for them?

This was my response:

I co-facilitated a social skills summer camp for special needs kids with many of the problems you described. They ranged in age from 6 to 12 and there were 10 of them.

What I did was to give them a better story than the one they were used to hearing about themselves -- a profoundly negative story that was imprinting itself more deeply every day on their sense of who they were and what life would be like for them. I completely changed the ballgame from a therapeutic or teaching environment into a Native American warrior rite. (Thus going with their aggressive impulses rather than trying to change them.)

To start with, I played non-percussive music -- mostly Carlos Nakai -- to create a relaxed and mysterious space totally outside of their ordinary lives. All the chairs were placed in a circle and they drew on the floor. I had each one draw fire (implicitly allowing safe expression of their anger and aggression through the metaphor of flames) and had them arrange their drawings together to create a campfire in the middle. I named my co-facilitator -- a social worker -- the Village Chief and myself the Medicine Chief. (Amazing how we both rose to those roles!)

I defined the kids as braves who were becoming adult warriors of the tribe. Their mission was to protect the people, not go to war because that wasn't necessary. All activities and social skills teachings were presented within this context of a brave band of warriors and their mentors. I told stories and myths about indigenous people and they responded with pictures and stories about themselves (some revealing through metaphor that they were experiencing violence, chaos, or trauma at home), and they learned the "warrior code" of behavior rather than "social skills" or "rules of conduct." There were no sticks, but there were plenty of colored rubber balls. To talk, you had to ask for and hold a "talking ball." Only it turned out not to be a ball; the kids decided that it was a sacred fossil containing the bones of a dinosaur that were the source of the power of the tribe and its warriors.

What happened with most of the children was that they were so spellbound by the imaginative world they found themselves in and who they were within that world that they forgot to be disruptive. Teaching took place "under the radar."

It wasn't perfect, of course, but we built in an exit point whereby kids who were disruptive could ask for or be "given" a time-out to go out into the hall with one of the co-facilitators to talk or just to sit quietly. No punishment, just calming retreat.

A year or so later, I used basically the same approach in a more subtle, sophisticated way with youths in a diversion from incarceration program and after that, with teens with HIV/AIDS who were living on the streets. Again, it imbued the groups and each member with a dignity and respect from adults and other kids that they rarely if ever had experienced, and they got to perform "up" to that new self-image rather than "down" to the low expectations most adults had for them.

All of us -- especially children and teens (and adults going through difficult times of loss and transition) -- hunger for dignity and self-expression within the structure of respectful community, as well as some kind of "roadmap" or pathway forward to a better sense of self and future. I've found the traditional rite of passage model and myths of all cultures immensely useful in creating these kinds of dynamic and nurturing environments.

copyright 2018 by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

We're all living in the wound. Here's a way we can begin to heal together.

Never in my life have  I felt such an urgent need for Something Good to happen for America. This is my contribution to a visionary discussion:

I am constantly amazed at how stories when shared merge in one meta-story that seems to be ready to be born in that space. Although our particulars differ, similar themes are in all of them. People who come to me are people looking for meaning and purpose in their experience and generally want to make something positive of their lives. In sharing their healing stories they heal both themselves and one another.

A few years ago, I facilitated a workshop at a conference for trauma therapists who had come to Washington, DC from all over the country. The nine participants in this workshop reflected the cultures and biases of their separate regions – a microcosm of our fractured country. Broken strangers, speaking emotionally incompatible languages, isolated within their own problems. The tension was palpable as, one by one, participants introduced themselves, their faces registering distaste, as faith-based counselor from the southwest met gay psychotherapist from New York, and fear of what might happen in this intimate gathering.

The young New Yorker had come early to sit quietly by the sunny window and gaze out at the Washington Monument rising like a lonely mast from the Federal Mall across the street. The sun was dazzling and warmed the corner of the large conference room where I had set up a small circle of chairs. He confided to me that he was overwhelmed with the two traumatic realities affecting his clients (and himself): AIDS and 9/11, and that he had hoped to find some strength by coming to the conference, but so far had felt only isolation. He didn’t have much hope for this, but the blurb had mentioned the healing power of story, it was the last day, and what the hell?

I gave an overview of healing story plot—crisis, struggle, transformation—the plot I’ve shared with so many who have attended my workshops and private sessions. The lack of engagement in my listeners was obvious as they rifled through the handout.

Until I uttered the password to the realm where magic happens: “Once upon a time...” and launched into a brief version of the end of the Odyssey, when Odysseus finally opens the way home to Ithaca through telling the stories of his lost wanderings after war.

People began to listen.

At the end, I asked my usual question: “What stands out for you?” There were a few questions about how this related to helping kids who had been sexually abused and how to separate one trauma from another in a person's life. The elephant in this room was the toxic disgust and distrust that permeated every conversation in the country, both then and even more so now.

After several nervous minutes, a woman from the southwest said that what resonated most for her was Odysseus' ten years adrift on sea and land. She had lost her own daughter to leukemia nine years before, and although she was a woman of faith who had attended many grief workshops and healing retreats, and even though she helped many others deal with their sorrows, she herself was stuck in the day her daughter died.

In eighteen years of facilitating healing story workshops among every possible population, including groups that were in extreme conflict, I've seen what happens when people share real stories. Minds come into sync; people step out of their small, anguished realities into a larger one. I have learned how to identify the exact moment when it happens: a palpable shift and softening in energy, a deepening quiet, a profound stillness: “I” becomes “We.” It happened here. The group became deeply quiet and attentive.

In the stillness, the man from New York said, “I know exactly what you mean.” He described the devastation that surrounded his life as a healer, gay man, and New Yorker still struggling years later to come to grips with the World Trade Center attacks and lingering AIDS epidemic. Others joined, sharing their own feelings of exhaustion from caregivers' occupational hazard, vicarious trauma. The group affirmed what I knew: People are yearning to tell their stories, but they don’t know how. The old tales help to release their words in offering a structure and an emotional buffer.

I invited the group to write for ten minutes whatever came up, without censoring or judging it. And, if they cared to, to read what they had written to the others. I put on “Natives,” an extremely beautiful CD featuring keyboardist Peter Kater and Native American flutist Carlos Nakai, which had always helped to create safe and peaceful environments in my story groups.

The woman read about the moment of her daughter’s death. As she did so, she raised her eyebrows when she read: “A peace came over Lila's face, and I knew at that moment she was in the arms of a love greater than even I her mother could give her.”

“I had forgotten that moment,” she wept softly.

“That helps me,” the young man said. He read his piece describing his desolation without a future, surrounded by trauma, but finding moments of peace in sunlight. Their inner stories had organically released  healing tears for both. The tensions in the group dissolved, as several others haltingly read their own writings.

I have no doubt that we are brought together to release life force in the world through the healing images and words we have within. From the Odyssey to grieving woman to frightened man, to group, mythic story generated wholeness and peace beyond divisive issues of the day.

No words from me were necessary; I let the silence surround them, each finding what they needed there. After a while, I brought the group to a less vulnerable state in preparation for the rest of the day. “What do you take from this?” I asked. One by one, almost every person shared how much more relaxed they were, less stressed, and feeling that they had truly connected with other people at a level they rarely got to experience, even in their families. Something real had happened. Nothing had actually changed; yet everything had. A larger story, beyond their personal lives, was being woven. This is what I now understand as a grail moment.

Great loss, traumatic experience, even lingering uncertainty tends to throw us into frozen isolation. We may feel as if we’ve fallen out of the flow of human life. Years can pass, yet we remain psychically immobilized. But when shared with receptive listeners and supported by a transformational narrative, telling our story brings us back into belonging.

Story reaches beneath the thinking, judging mind to the feeling one, leaping from one inner reality to another, where we are all human beings together standing on the common ground called life.