At the same time as I am slogging my way through a very cerebral and academic book on narrative psychology, I am noticing more and more about uses of story for various types of healing.
Here are some examples I’ve come across recently:
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- First, some background on narrative therapy: Not that every example here uses a technique that would necessarily be labeled “narrative therapy” (or narrative psychology), but many of the tenets are the same across the board. An article on Ezine Articles, Narrative Therapy — Concepts and Applications by Pedro Gondim, describes narrative therapy this way:
Narrative Therapy is an approach to counselling that centres people as the experts in their own lives. This therapy intends to view problems as separate entities to people, assuming that the individual’s set of skills, experience and mindset will assist him/her reduce the influence of problems throughout life. This therapeutic approach intends to place the individual in both the protagonist and author roles: switching the view from a narrow perspective to a systemic and more flexible stance.
- Refugee healing: For Vietnamese refugee Lucie Trinephi, telling
her personal story of fleeing Vietnam and being subjected to racist abuse in Paris is a way “to find peace. Katie Nguyen details Trinephi’s quest in Overcoming Trauma of Displacement through Storytelling, Illustration, in which Trinephi is “channeling these vivid memories into an illustrated book of her personal story.” - Storytelling in healthcare: I’ve read lots about the increased emphasis on gathering patients’ stories in the medical profession, most recently in an article by Sarah Kearns in HealthLeaders Media, Storytelling in Healthcare Enhances Experience for Patients and Providers, in which Kearns quotes Anna Tee, patient stories coordinator at the 1,000 Lives Campaign in Wales:
“‘Patient stories’ is a term that describes a powerful tool that is extremely effective in gathering, listening to, and making changes based on the patient’s voice,” says Tee. The process must allow for a patient or patient caregiver to present his or her experience with an illness or condition in his or her own words “to gain an understanding of what it is like as a patient.”
- Storytelling in Family Therapy: An unbylined article on the site Combat Alcoholism, Why Go to Family Therapy notes that a number of therapists in the Scottsdale, AZ, area are using storytelling in their therapy, offering these advantages:
Storytelling when used for family therapy relays ideas and messages holistically. This effect enables the listeners to receive the message in a simple, logical manner and through one session. …This technique opens up the family to therapist in a way that allows him to sort out the elements in logical sequence out from a chaotic setting. This approach connects the individual to time and space, and the direction of the sequence of events becomes clearer which allows the therapist to deliver a more sensible idea or message.
- Storytelling as indicator of mental and physical health: Perhaps more along the lines of diagnosis than healing is a blog entry Senia Maymin on Positive Psychology News, How You Tell the Story of Your Life, which discusses Martin Seligman’s book, Learned Optimism, in which Seligman asserts that “how a person tells a story can be an indicator of physical health and mental health.” Seligman cites several studies to support the assertion, including the Grant Study that I wrote about here, in which (based on the later analysis of Seligman and a colleague), the degree of optimism of the men studied at age 25 predicted health at age 60. The flip side of this type of study is perhaps the research reported by Patricia Donovan on the site Anxiety Insight, Personal post-trauma stories predict narrator’s emotional outcome, showing that ” the aftermath of national trauma, the ability to make sense out of what happened has implications for individual well-being and that the kinds of stories people tell about the incident predict very different psychological outcomes for them.” The national trauma in question was, of course, 9/11, and the researchers gathered “personal accounts about experiences of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 written by 395 adults from across the country, some of whom were more intimately connected to the events … than were others.” One of the researchers summed up the findings:
- First, some background on narrative therapy: Not that every example here uses a technique that would necessarily be labeled “narrative therapy” (or narrative psychology), but many of the tenets are the same across the board. An article on Ezine Articles, Narrative Therapy — Concepts and Applications by Pedro Gondim, describes narrative therapy this way:
… we found that psychological well-being was associated with post-trauma stories that were high in closure, high in redemptive imagery and high in themes of national redemption. Psychological distress, on the other hand, was significantly related to accounts that were low in closure, high in contaminative imagery and high in themes of personal contamination.
The full academic journal reference is: Adler JM, Poulin MJ. The Political Is Personal: Narrating 9/11 and Psychological Well-Being. J Personality 2009 Jul; 77(4):903-932
Maymin also points to a New York Times article reporting on a study about how people describe their problems in therapy. One of the researchers sees “the relevance of stories in all parts of a person’s life” and that People “draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not.” (The other researcher, interestingly, was Jonathan Adler, one of the researchers on the above 9-11 study). Next, Maymin reports on a study that showed that “using the third-person is a good technique to see the positive changes you’ve made in your life, and that is likely to lead to greater satisfaction with your efforts.” Finally, Maymin details an exercise created by Claude Steiner to identify “the stories people make up for themselves.” Specific questions in this exercise are these:
- What is your favorite fairy tale?
- Who is your favorite cartoon character?
- What movie most represents your life?
- Who is your favorite person?
- Whom would you be like if you could be like anyone?
- Journaling for healing: Because I consider journaling to be a close sibling to storytelling, I was interested in Kathleen Adams, who runs Center for Journal Therapy, which looks at the many applications journal therapy for holistic mental health.
- Storytelling for healing prisoners: Finally, Vandy Duffy in Storytelling and words that heal tells the secondhand story of Kathryn Windham, who told stories at a men’s prison: “When she finished the men stood and rushed her. The guards were unable to react as she was surrounded, this petite, elderly woman surrounded by a room full of prison inmates. One lifted her from the ground in a hug, others hugged her too. Over and over they hugged her. One inmate, tears streaming from his eyes said, ‘No one ever told me a story before.'” Duffy also cites Healing Story Alliance, a special interest group of the National Storytelling Network.