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.
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