From the time we exit the womb until the time we enter the sands, we begin to construct our personal narrative. In between these two points, a multitude of stories are created, some are significant enough for us to remember and tell over and over again and others are just small remnants of our day-to-day lives.
Whether it is the baby who cries, telling the story of his hunger, the teenager who rebels, telling the stories of their discontent, or the wife who rushes home to tell the details of her day, the stories of our lives reveal the platform of our identities.
Multiple Levels of Storytelling
There are multiple levels of storytelling—the story of the individual, the story of the family, the story of the community, and the story of the nation. Healing as defined as, curing the wounds, particularly those associated with slavery and its legacies, can also be achieved on these levels.
Richard Stone, the author of The Healing Art of Storytelling, says “Without stories, life becomes a book cover without the pages—nice to look at, but not very fulfilling”.
Let’s be honest — one of the hardest things to decide is where to start your story. If you don’t know where to begin, you don’t know where to take things either. It’s easy to feel like you’re chasing your tail.
Do you start by figuring out the story of where you’re going?
Do you start by figuring out the story of where you’re coming from?
Five Reasons to Tell Your Story
Here's a list of five reasons why telling your story can be healing:
Telling your story helps you process events. ...
Telling your story helps you stay in touch with your true self. ...
Telling your story helps You know you're not alone. ...
Telling your story humanizes you. ...
Telling your story helps you release negativity.
Why? Because telling your story—while being witnessed with loving attention by others who care—may be the most powerful medicine on earth. Each us is a constantly unfolding narrative, a hero in a novel no one else can write. And yet so many of us leave our stories untold, our songs unsung—and when this happens, we wind up feeling lonely, listless, out of touch with our life’s purpose, plagued with a chronic sense that something is out of alignment. We may even wind up feeling unworthy, unloved, or sick.
Other Reasons to Tell Your Story
Every time you tell your story and someone else who cares bears witness to it, you turn off the body’s stress responses, flipping off toxic stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine and flipping on relaxation responses that release healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, and endorphins. Not only does this turn on the body’s innate self-repair mechanisms and functions as preventative medicine—or treatment if you’re sick. It also relaxes your nervous system and helps heal your mind of depression, anxiety, fear, anger, and feelings of disconnection.
You Are Not Alone
So many of us are tormented by the insane idea that we’re separate, disconnected beings suffering all by our little lonesome selves. I say this from experience. That’s exactly how I felt when I started sharing my story as if I was the only one in the whole wide world who had lost her mojo and longed to get it back. Then I started telling my story—and voila! Many people told me they had lost their mojo too—or even more inspiring, that they had once lost theirs and since gotten it back.
The Power of Storytelling
When we tell our stories and others bear witness, the notion that we are disconnected beings suffering alone dissolves under the weight of evidence that this whole concept is merely an illusion and that millions of others are suffering just like us. They say misery loves company, and it’s true! The minute you discover that someone else is suffering just like you—or even better, that they’re celebrating their wholeness just like you—that sense of disconnection eases and you start to glimpse the truth—that we are beings of vibrating energy, connected on the energy internet through processes like quantum entanglement, with overlapping consciousness that connects us to a divine Source and to the Inner Pilot Light of every being on this planet (and perhaps others.)
The Power of Vulnerability
To benefit fully from the healing medicine of telling your story, you must resist holding anything back. You must strip off your masks, be unapologetically you, ditch worrying about what “everybody” is going to think, and let your glorious freak flag fly. Otherwise, your story becomes a watered-down, milktoast version of who you are.
As Brene' Brown teaches in her TEDx talk, The Power of Vulnerability, she says: the gateway to intimacy is via being vulnerable about your imperfections. If you try to sugarcoat your story, you miss out on the sense of connection with another human being that you can only attain when you're letting someone see your warts and your big ugly tail. Every time you expose those imperfections - and someone loves you despite - even because of those imperfections, you gain trust ( or as Brene' calls it, you "put marbles in the jar") Over time, the intimacy you feel with other people depends on how many marbles are in your jar.
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