Story Medicine: How Metaphor Heals

If you're interested in transformational or therapeutic storytelling, this recent personal experience may serve as a template for how it can work.

For a long time, I've been asking for a Me in my life--someone who works at the depth and with the creativity I do--a healing story practitioner. 

She's arrived. Turns out that she's been here for a while, observing me, and decided it was the right moment to step forth and offer me a transformational partnership.

The other night, across the thousands of miles that separate her home from mine, I described what was going on in my life. She, with her own creative intuition, saw the colliding and conflicting demands that felt crushing to me--none of them self-created but all of them mine to resolve--as a group of whirling dervishes: out of control, without their form, bumping into and falling all over each other, creating havoc. Their dance was toxic; it needed to be stopped, and they needed to be sent to their rooms to quiet down. 

In my "real" life, she said, there needed to be compartmentalization of the issues and inner boundaries established to untangle the emotional chaos that was threatening my health and well-being.  


The Curative Power of Playfulness
 

Storymaker that I am, I glided into this delicious scenario as all-loving Rumi. I quietly stopped the whirling and asked each dervish to go to his own room to seek the Beloved. "The moment you accept what troubles you've been given, the door will open," wrote Rumi hundreds of years ago. 

My Rumi suggested they ask this question: "What is struggling to be born in this place?" Then he advised them to listen deeply.

One by one, Rumi worked with each dervish to untangle the inner knots that were creating a ripple effect of chaos in the community, and to regain his proper form.

Eventually, the dance resumed with peace and discipline, and the presence of the Beloved radiated in the golden light of the circle.

Before Rumi left, he reminded the dancers to "meet whatever comes at the door laughing, for it has been sent as a Guide from Beyond."

Play is Serious Business!

I slowly quieted down and regained my center as I shared my improvisational story with my partner, who was right there with me, witnessing and affirming the transformation. 

What happened here? She helped me change the story by listening as my healing imagination gave me the medicine I needed. More: she let my own my inner resilience work. My self-perception in that moment changed from that of a victim jeopardized by life's tangles into a ruler of my life who saw an opportunity to remake a situation, imagine something new, create a different story. 

And the effect, according to new neuroscience? A rewiring in the brain, detoxification and settling down of the central nervous system, an awakening of the right brain, and a resumed flow of life force. 

In my experience, nothing matches the rejuvenating, restoring power of the imagination applied to life. Meta-phor: To go beyond. "The imagination has powers of resurrection that science cannot match," wrote the author Ingrid Bengis. Through metaphor, I reframed and re-authored a situation. I played.

The following day, I woke up with the mad whirling, but was able to recreate the dervishes in my morning meditation, and to laugh. As a result, I sat quietly and then did my own practice so essential to my well-being: Qigong. I began to feel again the flow of my bright spirit.

This past week I was able to move through two grueling, left-brained consulting assignments at a large international agency; able to work on the most difficult chapter of my Write of Passage book, "The Valley of the Shadow," in which the hero finally overcomes the forces that block forward movement; and able to make several critical calls that involved a very difficult situation with a family member. 

I did all this with the poise, confidence, and deliberateness of a Ruler. Yes, I'm tired. But I'm also serene. I stepped up to the plate, did my best, and then I slept soundly.


Thank you, Rumi!

The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. 
                                       -Rumi

All rights reserved, except for Rumi poem and real Rumi quote, 2013, Juliet Bruce, Ph.D.

 

Divided Brain, Broken World: How the War in Our Heads is Destroying Our Planet

There's a great deal of interest now in neuroplasticity (the brain's ability to grow and change) and particularly in restoring the processes and values of the right brain to every area of life. There are many ways to do this, including meditation, active engagement in the arts, spiritual practice, exercise -- especially yoga/tai chi/qigong, good nutrition, adequate sleep, and loving. In my current series of blog posts, I'm exploring the impact of story on the brain. The first article (January 2012, http://livingstory-ny.blogspot.com/2012/01/this-is-your-brain-on-story.html) gave an overview of how story integrates the brain; this post brings clarity to the problem of the divided brain; and the third will look at story structure, the dramatic arc, and metaphor as gateways to right brain perception.

The evidence of decline is everywhere and growing:
~ A recent Washington Post article told of a creative, highly motivating young teacher who was fired because the tests scores of her mostly inner city students were too low;
~ Gifted and creative students stifled and channeled into unfulfilling professional careers instead of the ones for which they were meant;
~ Growing addiction to virtual reality at the cost of intimate relationships;
~ Increased incidence of depression and bipolar disorder;
~ Increasing materialism accompanied by inner emptiness;
~ Environmental destruction;
~ Loss of opportunities to engage in dialogue with people and groups who disagree on issues, reflected in paralyzing divisiveness and partisanship at all levels of government, economic, and community life;
~ Media narratives that rely on glib sound bites, highlight conflict, and ignore ambiguity, resulting in intensified demonization of the different "others," and a pervasive paranoia;
~ Most alarmingly, endless and now renewed threat of war.

This is the reality we humans have created for ourselves and all other living beings on this planet. And it's a pure reflection of the wildly controlling, and out-of-control, left brain, according to British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. (McGilchrist gives a 10-minute summation of his thesis, with illustrations, at TED Talks.)

HOW THE BRAIN IS SUPPOSED TO WORK
The right and left sides of the brain tell vastly different stories about reality. Each has its own values and priorities, its own logic and language. Although the left hemisphere is commonly thought of as the seat of language and rationality and the right as the center of creativity, in fact both are essential to creativity and each has its own logic. The difference is not in what they do, but in how they do it, according to McGilchrist. Most simply, the left brain gives narrow, intense focus while the right enables a global awareness of context and patterns.

McGilchrist describes balanced functioning of the brain in a chicken pecking for seeds in a patch of pebbles: its left brain is focused on finding the seeds among the stones; while its right brain is focused on other possibilities and predators. The left brain defines its territory; its right brain is ready to move to another.

As different as they are, the two hemispheres are meant to collaborate. Without the right brain, life is a dry husk of an existence, barren and joyless, strangled in structures that have no intrinsic meaning. Without the organizing power of the left hemisphere, the right brain is a dream state without end, disorganized absorption of sensory data, the nightmare of schizophrenia.

Throughout human history, in small tribal communities, through the arts and ritual, and living in nature, the two hemispheres of the brain were in dialogue. However, with the growth of science, industry, urbanization, and technology over the last three hundred years, the controlling left brain began to take over, marginalizing and devaluing the parts of life that rose out of the non-competitive right brain.

The result, as McGilchrist describes it, is a world reflecting the story the left brain wants to tell -- not the whole story of existence. This leaves us caught in an agonizing paradox: we search for happiness and find emptiness; yearn for freedom yet are trapped within a web of regulations, hierarchies, and material expectations; we strive for creativity but are stifled by judgment; long for intimacy, connectedness, and warmth but are addicted to technology.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE BRAIN - A QUICK TOUR
The good news: the brain is not formed early in life, but is “plastic," able to adjust, modify, and regenerate for most of human life. It’s the core of our resilience in fact -– a trait needed more than ever in these unstable times. We can learn how to change and regenerate the brain, and as a result the world.

But what are we really talking about when we talk about the divided brain? I'm going to be very left-brained and offer you a grossly oversimplified map and narrative tour of the brain.

1. The left hemisphere tells a story of control and power. It's the part of the brain responsible for the structures and thought processes of basic survival and civilized society. Think bourgeois village, tract housing development, cubicled offices -- the standard built environments through which we move, the verbal and written languages we use to communicate, the focus we bring to work and love. It's the part of the brain we use when we're engaged in analytic and logical thinking, concentrate on precise details, create plans, articulate feelings and thoughts verbally in meaningful sequence, measure the results of our efforts. The left brain moves from the parts to the whole, arranging the pieces in a logical order, and drawing conclusions from the process.

The left brain has been successful in establishing its dominance because it shuts out what it doesn't know and its ability to simplify and categorize lends itself to framing public debates and media narratives. Next time a sound bite captures your attention, it's someone else's left brain communicating with yours.

The strength is the problem: left brain awareness is a closed system reflecting only itself, like a hall of mirrors, and cuts off all routes of escape, such as those found in ritual, art, spirituality, and nature. The result is a world that is increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, and meaningless - a world on the path to ruin.

2. The right hemisphere encompasses everything else -- nature in all its magnificence and chaos, the unconscious, the senses, imagination, and intuition. it's also connected to compassion. The right brain is the gateway to the limbic region of the brain, which holds our ability to attach to others. It's the realm of context and meaning. Right brain consciousness rises from the well of Oneness, the ground of existence, what many experience as God. It's by means of the right brain that we create metaphor, find meaning in experience, and gain access to our interior life. Through right brain consciousness, we feel our experience and understand it within a greater reality. The right brain also holds the ability to rejuvenate and heal. In fact, Dr. Dan Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist, says that healing is the restoration of the right brain.

The strength of the right brain -- its visual and metaphorical genius, its ability to see patterns and ambiguity -- is also its weakness in the face of left brain dominance. It speaks the language of metaphor rather than the language of debate; it works more slowly than the left and its awareness is both more global and more diffuse, making its contributions seemingly less effective in the fast-moving public arena.

3. At the bottom of a deep indentation separating the two hemispheres is a small sheath of fibers called the corpus callosum. The function of this organ is ambiguous: it both divides and connects the two sides of the brain. The corpus callosum transfers motor, sensory, and cognitive information between the brain hemispheres and is involved in several functions of the body, including eye movement and maintaining a balance between attention and arousal. With evolutionary changes, this organ has become larger and more dense; it seems to be functioning increasingly as a separator and less as a transmitter of information.

4. At the front tip of both hemispheres is the prefrontal cortex (in blue), the newest part of the brain, and the one area of the brain that distinguishes humans from other animals. Very simply, the function of the prefrontal cortex is to step back, inhibit impulses from the limbic regions of the brain to which it is attached, evaluate, and make choices. McGhilchrist describes two basic abilities residing in the prefrontal cortex: first, to manipulate the outer world and second, to sense the inner reality of another. It's the neural "decider": shall we act only in our own perceived self-interest (nudged on by the voice of the left brain) or shall we act from a foundation of compassion and the good of all (the urgings from the right)?

The prefrontal cortex gives human beings the capacity to be witness to our own experience, as well as to imagine a different and better reality. In other words, this is the story brain, which takes information coming in from all parts of the brain and creates a coherent narrative that drives action. In this epoch of left-brain domination, the prevailing narratives being spun by the world frontal cortex are separatist, fear-based, and filled with trauma -- past, present, and future. With a restored ability to "see whole," the concrete realism of left brain story could be integrated with the greater vision of the right.

The brain has gone through massive evolutionary change at different times throughout human history -- always related to how humans told their story. In recorded history, the left hemisphere began to take over when people made the leap from being oral creatures to becoming literate ones, when someone took a stick and made the first crude markings on stone. The left brain continued to strengthen with the advent of the printing press, with the Enlightenment, with the increased use of science to define experience, and finally with the growth of technology. We're at another evolutionary leap with the global connectivity offered by the internet. And we see everywhere the beginnings of a pendulum swing back to left and right hemisphere balance.

The question is, will it happen in time?

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ALL PARTS OF THE BRAIN WORK TOGETHER

In the next and last article in this series, I’ll look at the structure, characters, and settings of story as a metaphorical journey toward integration of the two hemispheres, and why all people need to become storytellers as well as listeners before it's too late to tell a new story.

By Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

Reference

This is Your Brain on Story

This is the first article in a series on story and the brain.

There is nothing more powerful than story. Those who tell stories literally create the world -- for better or worse. It's sometimes said that an enemy is someone whose story you don't yet know. But we can just as easily say that war starts with a story of threat. The stories we tell about our lives shape the way we interpret information streaming through our senses to our conscious mind. More than that, story shapes the brain itself.

Increasingly, neuroscientists understand the brain as a "plastic" structure that changes and adapts over a lifetime rather than one that is "finished" at a certain early point in life. Storytelling, in its healing use, intrigues brain researchers because of its observed ability to actually reduce symptoms of physical and mental illness, calm stress, and create deep emotional connection between teller and listeners.

We now live in a world of agonizing paradox: searching for happiness and finding emptiness; yearning for freedom yet increasingly caught in a web of regulations, hierarchies, and material expectations; striving for creativity and strangled by judgment; wanting intimacy, connectedness, and warmth but addicted to technology and virtual reality.

The underlying cause, says British psychiatrist Iain McCalister, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, is illustrated by the popular graphic above. The two hemispheres of our brain, left and right, which are meant to function collaboratively, are no longer doing so.

The control-seeking, standardizing, rational left brain has taken over, creating a world in its own image while marginalizing the humanizing, intuitive, inspired intelligence of the right brain, says McCalister. In its very nature, the left brain is a closed system that reflects only itself, like a hall of mirrors, like Narcissus gazing at his reflection -- a world that refuses to accept anything it doesn't already know.

Here's where story, creator of worlds, enters the picture:

In archetypal healing story, the claiming of the Grail is a metaphor for the integration of ego (the personality or smaller self) with Self (the part of us that connects with all of life, the collective unconscious, our soul). From a brain perspective, it is also a journey out of the ordinary world of left brain consciousness into the "special" world of the right.

In these stories, the hero is often an ordinary person who takes an extraordinary journey that kills the old limiting and self-absorbed ego, and releases Self into their life. They return with the ability to "see whole" -- that is, to see the whole picture of life from the perspective of whole brain, collective unconscious, the Soul. Understanding at last the core need beneath suffering and conflict, they are able to take the right action to restore life to a dead situation.

So can you see how story is a whole-brain experience?

~ “Once upon a time…” opens the gates to a vast but unconscious realm of information stored in the right half of your brain. Sensory images, landscapes, characters, and dramatic situations activate powerful memories, fantasies, and emotional states.

~ Story structure, including beginning, middle, and end; the sequence of scenes or chapters; suspense and dramatic arc -- these are the hooks that keep the left brain entertained, attentive, and satisfied.

~ Very briefly, story channels the intuitive, emotional, and inspired power of your right brain through the rational, structuring, and strategic power of the left brain. Aligned, the two hemispheres of your brain exert an enormous integrating and creative power, very likely beyond anything you've experienced.

You may have heard the phrase: "Change your thoughts; change your life." Well, now that phrase is evolving into "Change the brain; change the world."

You are so much more powerful than you know!

Two articles exploring story and the brain follow in the next couple of months. The next one is "Divided Brain, Broken World, and the Need for Healing Stories." The last article in this series is "Healing the Split: Why We Tell and Listen to Stories."

by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

Creativity, Compassion, and the Resilient Brain

As someone who has witnessed the amazing power of storytelling and other expressive modalities to support healing in many hundreds of people coping with the impact of childhood abuse, adult trauma, grief, severe mental illness, and depression, I'm interested in neuroplasticity, which is the term for the brain's ability to repair and rebuild itself throughout life.

(The graphic comes from http://www.knutsford-scibar.co.uk.)

Recently I listened to a series of web conferences on this topic sponsored by the The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. http://www.nicabm.com.

On Wednesday, April 6, 2011, Dr. Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who's well known for writing a number of books on the developing brain and the mindful brain, spoke about how early relationships shape the development of the brain, and how later experience can change it. (His web site: http://drdansiegel.com/.) I'm going to share with you a summary of the notes I took during the call, with my later reflections in italics. Basically, Dr. Siegel's talk scientifically affirmed everything I've experienced in egalitarian, non-clinical, expressive arts groups.

Dr. Siegel noted that the right brain is the seat of compassion, sense of context, oneness, refreshment, and it can be accessed through creativity, exercise, and meditation. It holds the consciousness of the Ground, context, symbolic meaning, interior life, and the ability to rejuvenate and heal. The left brain -- dominant in our culture -- connects to exterior life, strategic thinking, and literal meaning. A balance of both halves of the brain is necessary for optimal functioning. In some of its aspects, healing can be understood as a journey of patient and caregivers to strengthen right brain functioning:

1. Empathy -- connecting to the inner life of another person -- has been shown to improve every physical system in the body: immune, cardiovascular, and organ systems. The more interest a doctor expresses in the inner life of a patient, i.e., how that patient experiences their illness rather than symptomology, the more likely a positive outcome. According to Dr. Siegel, THE KEY TO OPTIMAL HEALING IS THE CONNECTING INNER LIFE TO INNER LIFE [my emphasis]. This means that doctors, teachers, therapists, parents, clergy must be in touch with their own inner lives. He called it practicing medicine, parenting, marrying, etc. from the inside out.

Storytelling is the most ancient and powerful way of reciprocal sharing inner life with another. Any of the non-verbal expressive media serve the same purpose. But we're narrative creatures, seeking meaning in our experience. This is the realm of story.

2. Scientists now accept health as wholeness, integration -- a natural drive, rather than conforming to an external standard of "fitness" or "normal," as it had previously. Neural integration means the linking of fragmented parts through brain fibers that connect different neurological parts and functions. In people who suffered early neglect or abuse, these integrative fibers have been damaged and the brain is not functioning as a harmonious system. Consequently, the body's systems are not functioning harmoniously and trauma or neglect often shows up somatically.

Story making, in its very nature, creates wholeness and integration. It holds conflict in the form of characters and situations in a larger container, and allows these conflicts to play out and resolve themselves naturally as a new story emerges. As storyteller of our lives, we are also the integrating consciousness.

3. The brain regulates the movement of energy throughout the nervous system and healthy, harmonious outer relationships strengthen this function. Chaotic, draining, turbulent relationships significantly impact neurological functioning.

The healing community that forms in story groups, or any other healing relationship based on a right-brain modality (not therapy necessarily, unless it has these qualities of creativity and inner life to inner life), be it authentic movement, expressive dance, free form visual arts, music making and listening, yoga, reiki, qigong (my spiritual practice), mindfulness meditation, equine therapy, shamanic chant, etc. becomes the container that holds a person and gives their brain an integrative environment, time, and space to heal itself and the integrative fibers to regrow.

4. Humiliation, shame, bullying are assaults on the whole system. What happens in the brain is that a natural drive for wholeness and expression slams on the brakes, and the victim is left with a sense of helplessness, anger, toxic release of cortisol -- the stress hormone. It kills synaptic connections in the brain. This manifests physically as nausea, a sense of being punched in the gut, avoidance of eye contact, heaviness in the chest. Inwardly it manifests as a sense of a defective self.

Storytelling and witness gives each person a sense of safety, belonging, and dignity, so necessary to thriving.

5. We are hard-wired to sense the intention of another -- especially if they have destructive or harmful intentions toward us. The stress hormone cortisol keeps us in a state of vigilance when our right brain senses danger in a relationship. But we are out of a state of integration and flow. Long-term emotional danger has enormous physical consequences.

Working with intuition, which is strengthened by the receptivity involved in creative process, makes us even more aware and responsive to toxicity in other people and situations. In these story groups, which are built on the sensory elements of time, environment, character, situation, and storyteller -- we become very attentive to where we are, what we're doing, and the often unconscious motivations and inner lives of others. For me at this point, story -- experiencing my life as an unfolding story with myself as the witness and storyteller -- is spiritual practice.

6. Mental illness, including depression and bipolar disorder, are apparently caused by thinness or inadequacy of integration fibers between the prefrontal cortex (our center of thought and choice) and the amygdala, the part of the brain that warns of danger and controls emotions. Meditation seems to enable these fibers to rebuild. In Dr. Siegel's work, patients suffering from manic-depression became completely symptom-free when practicing meditation and the other activities on a regular basis. Even with genetically created vulnerabilities, such as alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia, and illness, we can change those parts of the brain that are affected, thus moderating inherited weaknesses.

7. The practices that induce the brain to develop integration of its synapses and thickening of connecting fibers, especially between the prefrontal areas that support integration and the brain stem, which supports brain growth, are:

- meditation;
- aerobic exercise;
- Omega 3;
- originality, innovation, creativity, fresh ways of seeing things;
- paying close attention to everything coming in from the senses;
- enough sleep.

Expressive modalities - writing, dance and other expressive movement, visual art, music - create a state of healthy alertness, relaxation, and release. It feels like joy. It's the state of flow -- which is synonymous with the dynamic Self (vs. ego) delineated by ancient wisdom traditions and modern psychologists, including Jung and his followers.

8. Wholeness and integration manifests as vitality, fun, and light-heartedness.

In the mythic journey (the heart and soul of my story approach) the highest evolved archetype is the jester, who holds the whole truth of existence -- both its light and shadow -- within a non-harming joke and a good laugh.

-----

A list of Dr. Siegel's books, provided in a follow-up e-mail by Ruth M. Buczynski, PhD, President of The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, include:

The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are;
The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being;
Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation;
The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology).

ENJOY!

by Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. All rights reserved.