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.

How a Story Can Change a Life

On my own path to my passionate purpose, I discovered that every failure, every setback, and every depression was actually a call to step forth into an adventurous life that I had not yet imagined. Something in a story -- a character, event, landscape, even an image -- would touch me where I was most wounded and helped to bring it forth to rebirth. And in my imagination, what I call the Story Zone, the brave protagonist's path forward became my own.

I have lived story and know that every broken place in us can be exposed and attended to. I know intimately that through listening to meaningful stories and poems, writing improvisationally from them as a launch pad to whatever truth we hold in our hearts, and sharing our writing in non-judgmental community, we can turn our suffering into a salve for others who yearn for warmth and understanding. That in itself changes us from feeling victimized to becoming empowered.

NEXT FREE ONLINE STORY SANCTUARY: THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 8 EASTERN. WRITE julietbrucephd@gmail.com TO GET THE LINK.

When a Healing Story Arrives...

You can feel it, as if another, deeper presence has entered your space. In fact, a story often begins to tell itself. As a teller, something stronger than intellect is directing your words. As a listener, you might understand intuitively that someone is sharing something important-- a moment that may have shifted the arc of their life.

 

When a story arrives, we stop speaking in concepts (“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.

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 now 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- in fact, has arisen:

“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, the adult may reenact that lie that saved him over and over in a misguided attempt to free himself, as if re-listening to a garbled voice mail to understand the message. Fully told, he is invariably released from that freeze frame that has blocked the flow our life force around the issue of truth for decades. There’s no longer a need for him 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.

            

Give yourself 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 female client of mind did after telling a similar story, that the compulsive need to lie has dissolved. That story is over.

Try This

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

Teller: Tell the concept. 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. Thich Nhat Hanh once said in a retreat that 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 for listening to our inner voices of anguish. Respond with empathy and the strong emotion will soften and become quieter.)

Teller: Now describe the concept as a scene, 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, do not impose your own meanings and solutions, no matter how well-intended. Story medicine is based on the knowledge that each person intuitively knows what is right for them and your role as listener is to help them gain access to it. Respond with what you heard through your senses, and what had resonance for you.

Each of you: What do you each take from this exchange? You have engaged in dynamic, creative communication rather than a retelling of a problem.

            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 when we think or do one small thing differently.

In many years of facilitating story workshops and private sessions for every possible population, including people suffering extreme distress or who are in conflict, I have learned how to identify the exact moment when there's a palpable shift and softening in energy, a deepening quiet, a profound stillness. As well, I have learned how to hold this silence, for this is when the deep soul truth flows and some degree of healing takes place. I call it the Grail moment. It is the medicine of story.

         

All rights reserved, 2018, from my book in progress, "Write of Passage: For the Brokenhearted, a Story Path to Healing Change." Please do not use this text without my permission and crediting me.