The Power of Stories

The contents of this blog are my opinions and are not the opinions of any current or former colleagues. This is not to be construed as mental health or medical advice and does not constitute a relationship with a professional therapist.

The thing I hate about stories is that they're only ours until we tell them, and then, whether we like it or not, they belong to someone else. You can't control them, even if you want to, the second they're out of your grasp. And there's no putting them back and hiding them away again, after you let them loose and they leave your head (p. 145.) Thomas Ha’s “Sweetbaby” from Uncertain Sons and Other Stories.

I am an avid reader. I am reading Thomas Ha’s collection (for pleasure, not professionally.) It borders on horror, science fiction, and fantasy, but mostly it is a collection of weird stories. People might call it “weird lit” or “speculative fiction.” Those labels are less helpful than someone just saying “it is really good,” which I am doing for you now. That quote jumped out at me in the past few days, just leapt from the page, and it prompted me to consider the content of this blog post.

(Professionally, I just finished Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent [really riveting stuff!]; I just started Patricia A. DeYoung’s Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: Healing Right Brain Relational Trauma.)

Our lives and their pathways are not fixed in stone; instead they are shaped by story. The ways in which we understand and share the stories of our lives therefore makes all of the difference. If we tell stories that emphasize only desolation, then we become weaker. Alternatively, we can tell our stories in ways that make us stronger, in ways that soothe the losses, in ways that ease sorrow (p. vii, italics added for emphasis.) David Denborough’s Retelling the Stories of Our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience

I read the introduction to Denborough’s book some years back. I have thought about it a lot since then, especially Denborough’s line about desolation. I have often reflected on times when I have worked with clients who’s articulated narrative about themselves, and the world was so negative that I could never quite find a way to help them shift their story. With some clients, I have even gone as far as to question the efficacy of psychotherapy and wondered if it was making their narratives worse, not better. I am a social worker, not a neuroscientist, but this feels congruent to my understanding of neuroplasticity.

I was working with a client a few years ago. At the end of our sessions, they would often blurt out “I did a bad job of connecting to you today!” This happened in two or three sessions in a row. They had a truly unspeakable experience of childhood trauma, which can make feeling connected to others a lot more challenging, but I did not feel totally disconnected from them. I got curious about that expression. It appeared they were sharing an autonomous or automatic thought, i.e. some part of them needed to share that feedback with me. It was a part of their (and that part’s) story.

I was working with a client much more recently, and they expressed to me in a session (as, truthfully, they have done for years), “I am bad at mindfulness.” I listened to their narrative of events and, without a spirit of argument, reflected two aspects of mindfulness they had practiced: self-awareness of an intrusive inner critic, and use of between session Internal Family Systems therapy skills to engage the critic (they reported some success in getting the intrusive critic to soften when they asked it for space for the weekend.)

These experiences prompted me to consider, what do we do when our stories start to change, but our minds/parts do not agree, or they have not caught up with the new story (perhaps due to unawareness, or other factors, like being trapped somewhere else in our traumatic pasts.) An intervention I am fond of is to invite those parts of us to see the updates and decide for themselves. We do not twist arms, but what do you think about the present circumstances, the work the client put in, or the new narrative we are developing together? What parts seem agreeable to you, and which parts do you still have concerns about? Through personal and professional experience, some internal narratives can take a long time to start to change. I recently heard a therapist say that “belief is the opposite of curiosity.” This, friends, is the slow, careful, and diligent work of therapy. It is an ongoing negotiation with our parts about the validity and truthfulness of their stories about us, as well as our stories about them.

This post was reviewed by my friend and therapist peer Korry Arndt-Wenger, MA, LPCC. Some edits were made based on his feedback.