| Hey friend, |
| My Slow and Ongoing Journey While I have been aware of the idea that everyone has a story for most of my life, it took me a long time time to take my own story seriously and begin to honestly tell it. It took me even longer to share detailed stories in which others harmed me in some way. Only recently have I begun to acknowledge and grieve that I have coped with the pain of those stories in ways that have exacerbated harm to myself and others. Telling my stories has been been an uncomfortable but freeing experience as I am learning to interact with them in more life-giving, honest and hopeful ways. Minimization While some of you may identify with the trajectory that I just described, many of you may be thinking that I just outlined the story of someone who has been through harder things than you. After all, you came from a “good family”, right? Also, isn’t this just “playing the victim”? “The past is the past”. These are just some of the ways that I avoided engaging my story by minimizing it, and I still sometimes find myself falling into this avoidant pattern. However, as Adam Young and others have pointed out, minimization of your own story very well could be the obstacle that most gets in the way of you finding the healing in your life that you desire deep down. Being Human While everyone has a unique story, all of our stories contain the the narrative of harm experienced leading to more harm. Our ability to reshape that narrative increases when we honestly engage the particularities of our formative stories of shame and emotional pain. The Neuroscience of Telling Stories Neuroscience has come a long way in helping us to better understand why telling detailed stories helps to facilitate transformational healing. Dan Siegel writes in The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who You Are, “Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us”. In order to experience transformative healing, we must access our implicit memories and reconsolidate them (see Unlocking the Emotional Brain by Ecker, Ticic, and Hulley). Telling your stories to attuned listeners literally opens up new pathways to healing in your brain. Opportunities for Telling Stories We live in a distracted world, and finding attuned listeners for your stories can be a daunting task. Perhaps this is why many of us are looking to AI to hold our stories and help us to make to sense of them, but this comes with its own set of risks and shortcomings that are beyond the scope of this blog. If you want to learn more about this, just ask ChatGPT. Working with a therapist who helps you to access your implicit memories by attuning well to you and your stories can be a helpful step to take as you explore what it could look like for you to begin to tell your stories in more authentic and honest ways. Sharing stories in the context of a group can also be a powerful and healing experience. Robb Anderson, LMSW and I are launching Men’s Recovery Group at Midtown Psychotherapy Associates which will focus on holding space for stories that are relevant to the themes of masculinity, self-esteem, and relationships. If you or someone you know may be a good fit for this group, reach out to me or Robb! I’m excited about it and could go on and on about why I think this group is going to be a unique and helpful offering for this group of people whose actual stories sometimes get lost in addiction narratives. No matter what your journey looks like right now, I hope that you find connection with other human beings who listen to your stories and hold them with you. Sharing stories isn’t just a helpful exercise for alcoholics and addicts in a therapy group; it is a fundamental act of being human as we are all created to be deeply known by other human beings, not Gemini, ChatGPT, or even Claude. Peace, Palmer mccluskeycounseling.com Inspirations for this Post and Resources for Further Reading: – Make Sense of Your Story by Adam Young – Redeeming Heartache by Dan Allender and Cathy Loerzel – The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who You Are by Dan Siegel |
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