The healing power of narrative

Journaling, Shakespeare, and the stories in our bodies

Yesterday morning, I was having a conversation with my partner about an intense experience we’d recently shared, and I found I was getting more emotional than I’d expected, talking about it. Brimming over with a sense of longing and heaviness in my chest, and unsuccessfully fighting tears, I received some very good counsel: why don’t you write about this right now, while you’re feeling it?

It was absolutely the right call. Pouring my heart onto the page, putting into words the thing that had been little more than inarticulate sobs, calmed it, made it somehow manageable, even though it still continued to move me when the writing was done.

When developing a title for this newsletter, I was comforted by the fact that I could change it in the future if I wanted. How to title such a thing, after all? A tricky problem, when you’re wanting to talk about so many intersecting topics. But for the intersection of trauma and creative expression, “Write It Out” won out. To me it bespeaks in the briefest terms that most pure and true of all reasons for writing: because one must, or die.

Or at least forget. Humans are storytelling creatures, and being able to make sense of our thoughts and experiences using story is the way that many of us survive. For others, it may be simply a way of coming to understand the events of one’s life, to make meaning out of what can seem like a meaningless stream of seconds, minutes, years.

I have been using diaries and journals since I was around ten years old, and have been journaling online for over 20 years. I find, when I stop writing, that I lose track of time, of space, of my life. People ask me what I’ve been up to, and I find myself unable to tell them.

It’s not surprising, then, that my clients so often get benefit from journaling. I hesitate to give my clients “homework,” but I will frequently suggest that people journal. If they think they won’t be able to keep up with it, I ask them to write just a couple words or a sentence, even on a post-it or in the notes app of their phone. Or I’ll ask them to record a voice memo, or draw about it, or make a playlist about it, or even think of movies or TV shows that they resonate with, that help them make more sense of what they’re going through. Whatever form they choose, the point is to make some kind of record: what happened? What did it feel like? What did it remind you of? What do you wish had happened differently?

One of my clients journals assiduously, and she always finds that she can trace trends in her week. She notices when she was feeling depressed, or unattractive, or repulsed by something at home or work. Or how joyful, energized, or touched by some small moment. She can see how in a single day she might have said how much she didn’t want something, and then how she went and did it anyway. She can begin to construct the story, in essence, of her life. And when you have a story, you can have a chance of changing it.

One idea I’ve heard about trauma that I like very much is that healing from trauma occurs when the event transforms from a series of painful experiences that seem likely to happen again at any moment, to a story about something that happened to you a long time ago. It’s not the whole truth about healing from PTSD or C-PTSD, but it is one truth: what’s often missing for a survivor is a story that can be told without either being triggered or dissociating from it. A story that makes sense in your body, that can move through you unobstructed.

In 2015, I wrote a post in my healing blog that I’ll re-share here, about Shakespeare in prisons. (Quick note: I talk some about Rubenfeld Synergy, the method I was originally trained in, where these days I would use the phrase Somatic Therapy.) It’s about restoring people’s bodies to them, about finding healing in story. Through narrative, human beings can find endless riches: a sense of kinship, a mythological power, a cathartic release, a mirror, a feeling of peace. In the end, a story can give a painful experience its own life, so it no longer has to kick and scream inside you.

I hope you enjoy this brief dive into the power of narrative—words, music, theatre, art—to create lasting change.

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Shakespeare helps restore the body’s story to prisoners

June 18, 2015

At the recent conference of INARS, the professional organization around Rubenfeld Synergy, we talked a great deal about the restoration of movement to the body, and how restoring movement can give us our sense of soul back. In an interview with Bessel van der Kolk, he spoke of how in trauma, the body gets stuck in the experience, and the brain is unable to make narrative out of it – the story we have about our lives that helps us process and synthesize intense experience.

So when I also heard in that interview about a Shakespeare program as an alternative to prison for juvenile delinquents (van der Kolk joked about them being “condemned to be a Shakespeare actor”), I started thinking about the ways that theatre can help restore people to themselves. I had heard a This American Life episode called simply “Act V,” about a group of maximum-security prisoners performing a portion of Hamlet, and I was transfixed by the ways in which working with Shakespeare’s text and embodying his characters helped these men to reflect on their crimes, to know themselves better, and to heal.

It turns out that this idea has some traction, and a simple search on “shakespeare in prisons” turns up Shakespeare Behind Bars, a Shakespeare in Prisons conference, an Atlantic article and an NPR article on the topic, covering instances of this practice in Kentucky, Indiana, New York, and at Notre Dame.  What is it that makes the Bard so compelling as a tool for prisoner rehabilitation?

I cannot overstate the power of narrative to make sense of emotion, of difficult experiences, of our very lives. Human beings are meant to tell stories; it is something we have done in one way or another since there were people we can recognize as human. And making stories – whether with spoken word, ritual, theatre, writing, art, music, dance, or games – is the most powerful tool we have for freeing our bodies from the “thousand slings and arrows that flesh is heir to,” and making the things that hurt and scare us most manageable. In acting Shakespeare, what has been trapped inside literally becomes expression, emotion and story that happens outside the body, even as it is generated by the body – the limbs and heart and face and vibrating vocal cords of a human being trying to make sense of the world.

In Rubenfeld Synergy, we combine talk and touch in order to help people not just access the stories that are held within their bodies, but to tell them in words – to make narrative out of the body’s sometimes incoherent signals, responses, pains and tensions. By going inward we find how the mind makes associations with sensations as we pay close attention to them. But the next and vitally important step is to express outward – to tell that story so that we may better understand ourselves.

These prisoners, then, in my view, are using the Bard’s words to help them in their journey of self-knowledge, and in acting those words, are moving emotions through their bodies that are similar to ones they know from their previous lives: jealousy, love, anger, guilt, shame, the thirst for revenge, the possibility of redemption.

I work with text as well as the body. If you are a performer, a storyteller, or just someone who wants to make sense of your life – contact me.