Healing stories
Tell me a story! Part 3 - Healing stories
29/07/08 13:01
For a while now, I’ve been talking to people about whether writing about past and present emotional difficulties helps in transcending those difficulties…whether writing is a means of coming to terms with emotional upheavals and healing from them.
This post is going to be low on personal opinions; I would rather simply share some of my findings with you.
My first major finding would be that writing facilitates emotional understanding, that by writing about past difficulties, we frame those difficulties in a way that is graspable and comprehensible. Some people mentioned that they felt their physical health had improved as a result of writing.
Overall, those who seemed to get the most benefit from writing, and I’m still open on this particular observation, were those who imposed a fictional narrative of some sort. I’m not quite sure how this works but it probably reflects my own experience of writing too. Maybe it’s about the act of taking a messy, complicated or disturbing experience and turning the experience into a story that makes it more manageable. Perhaps, the dimension of adding fictional narrative somehow placed their personal story at a distance where they could see it more clearly. I’m not entirely sure.
People who wrote about personal difficulties over long periods of time derived less benefit from writing their stories, than those who set themselves short-term limits to write and wrote their feelings in a “splurge” without regard to style, content or grammar.
For people who wrote about their emotional pain over long periods of time, there was a tendency to get locked into a cycle of self-pity and endless introspection. This was most pronounced in those who published extended stories of personal anguish in a web log (blog) My overall impression was that what happened, more often than not, was that it attracted a club that held itself together through the sharing and mutual identification with the emotional difficulty. The odd one or two people reported that they found the identification of others with their personal problems normalised their experiences.
“It made me realise that this problem was not only about me and that it happens to others too.”
People found it generally useful to share and talk about those stories with those close to them or others involved in the life episode, but less beneficial to discuss the issues with the public via a blog.
For bloggers, I noticed a tendency to do transference and identification with others participating on their blog. This was not always helpful to the writer, to the person trying to come to terms with his or her own emotional past. There’s a piece here about five posts down the page on transference and identification if you are interested to know more.
For people who had written about past emotional experiences over an extended period, I asked, “How easy would it be to write a new story going forward in your life, to write the next chapter of your own life?”
This question was frequently expressed along these lines:
“Do you feel able to write stories about how it might feel to be empowered to lead the life you wish to lead? Are you able to pick up your “pen” (metaphorically speaking!) and say “Okay, that was all my story then, but I have my own life and I’m going to move on with the script?” What’s the next chapter?” By the way, if you did that would you feel you were letting yourself or others down, including the readers of your blog? What and how would you like to exist beyond the present?”
This question interests me greatly, but I’m unsure if I have a sufficiently large response to give feedback as yet. I have a notion that those whom I asked the question found it to be interesting “food for thought”.
So in summary, most people who used story-writing to come to terms with emotional difficulties, pain and upheavals, said that story writing improved their emotional wellbeing, and sometimes their physical health.
The greatest benefits were obtained when:
1. They wrote regularly for short periods of time in peace and quiet
2. They limited the time period for which they would write about a certain event, normally to less than two weeks
3. They wrote without attention to style, content, spelling or grammar, letting the story “spill out”
4. They wrote for themselves and not an audience other than those involved or those close to them
5. They wrote only when they felt strong enough and able to face the past difficulty
6. They imposed a fictional narrative on the story
There is little new to add to existing research here, although I did find the responses from bloggers interesting and I am not aware that this has been covered before.
This post is going to be low on personal opinions; I would rather simply share some of my findings with you.
My first major finding would be that writing facilitates emotional understanding, that by writing about past difficulties, we frame those difficulties in a way that is graspable and comprehensible. Some people mentioned that they felt their physical health had improved as a result of writing.
Overall, those who seemed to get the most benefit from writing, and I’m still open on this particular observation, were those who imposed a fictional narrative of some sort. I’m not quite sure how this works but it probably reflects my own experience of writing too. Maybe it’s about the act of taking a messy, complicated or disturbing experience and turning the experience into a story that makes it more manageable. Perhaps, the dimension of adding fictional narrative somehow placed their personal story at a distance where they could see it more clearly. I’m not entirely sure.
People who wrote about personal difficulties over long periods of time derived less benefit from writing their stories, than those who set themselves short-term limits to write and wrote their feelings in a “splurge” without regard to style, content or grammar.
For people who wrote about their emotional pain over long periods of time, there was a tendency to get locked into a cycle of self-pity and endless introspection. This was most pronounced in those who published extended stories of personal anguish in a web log (blog) My overall impression was that what happened, more often than not, was that it attracted a club that held itself together through the sharing and mutual identification with the emotional difficulty. The odd one or two people reported that they found the identification of others with their personal problems normalised their experiences.
“It made me realise that this problem was not only about me and that it happens to others too.”
People found it generally useful to share and talk about those stories with those close to them or others involved in the life episode, but less beneficial to discuss the issues with the public via a blog.
For bloggers, I noticed a tendency to do transference and identification with others participating on their blog. This was not always helpful to the writer, to the person trying to come to terms with his or her own emotional past. There’s a piece here about five posts down the page on transference and identification if you are interested to know more.
For people who had written about past emotional experiences over an extended period, I asked, “How easy would it be to write a new story going forward in your life, to write the next chapter of your own life?”
This question was frequently expressed along these lines:
“Do you feel able to write stories about how it might feel to be empowered to lead the life you wish to lead? Are you able to pick up your “pen” (metaphorically speaking!) and say “Okay, that was all my story then, but I have my own life and I’m going to move on with the script?” What’s the next chapter?” By the way, if you did that would you feel you were letting yourself or others down, including the readers of your blog? What and how would you like to exist beyond the present?”
This question interests me greatly, but I’m unsure if I have a sufficiently large response to give feedback as yet. I have a notion that those whom I asked the question found it to be interesting “food for thought”.
So in summary, most people who used story-writing to come to terms with emotional difficulties, pain and upheavals, said that story writing improved their emotional wellbeing, and sometimes their physical health.
The greatest benefits were obtained when:
1. They wrote regularly for short periods of time in peace and quiet
2. They limited the time period for which they would write about a certain event, normally to less than two weeks
3. They wrote without attention to style, content, spelling or grammar, letting the story “spill out”
4. They wrote for themselves and not an audience other than those involved or those close to them
5. They wrote only when they felt strong enough and able to face the past difficulty
6. They imposed a fictional narrative on the story
There is little new to add to existing research here, although I did find the responses from bloggers interesting and I am not aware that this has been covered before.
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Tell me a story! Part 2 - Love stories
28/07/08 15:01
Moving away from grand theory and back to psychology, I have been interested in the power of stories for a long time.
Most recently, I have been talking to other storywriters and to people who have spent much time in writing journals about painful or difficult experiences on-line as blogs to share with others. I have also talked to people who kept journals, or simply used writing as a means to express difficulties or come to terms with trauma.
Before that I had been considering the work of Robert Sternberg, who wrote the book, “Love is a story”.
Sternberg’s work interested me particularly as it was a dramatic departure from normal psychology methods. Traditional psychologists have tended to frame their questions, and establish empirical research that they tested for statistical validity, and used subsequently to formulate the premises of their arguments.
There are all sorts of problems with empirical research, a lot of which have to do with the propensity of the respondents to answer questions in terms of what they feel the right answers to be in accordance with social, cultural, religious, family and other personal norms, pressures and expectations.
I believe that Sternberg used an empirical approach, but it was not his starting point.
We are not born with knowledge of what love is, what it means, how to love and how to sustain love successfully.
We learn about it. At a very early age, we learn about it unconsciously from our experience of our parents, people with whom we come into contact, physical and tactile experience, and basic physical and social interaction with others. A little later we start to absorb other images from books, films, television, kindergarten, school and every other source of emotional and social experience.
Sternberg argues, and I have some affinity with his views, that, based on these early experiences, we assemble our views about love as forms of narrative systems, as stories, which we enact in our later lives. Thus compatibility becomes a matter of finding someone with a story that might live comfortably alongside our own.
In Sternberg’s work, for example, we have “garden” stories, where the emphasis is on planting, nurturing and growing. That’s a tender narrative, although it may be a little low on excitement for some.
We have a travel story where life is a journey, a never-ending movement of discovery. The destination is less important since the person gets their emotional sustenance from the journey itself. In terms of the twenty-five or so stories, that Sternberg cites, I find this one, possibly, one of the more attractive (for me).
There’s the war story where partners remain permanently in conflict, but nevertheless, to the astonishment of observers, stay in the relationship. Perhaps the war relationship is portrayed well in the play, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Where I might differ from Sternberg is that he argues the case that only experts like himself might interpret the stories that people have within them of which they are largely unconscious.
I’m not sure whether I believe that these stories are so unconscious, nor if they need the intercession of an expert to understand them.
I had another idea with which I experimented that yielded some interesting results. I wrote about it earlier here:
“It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our emotions and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our feelings without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should write a story, a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks only a story; one that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We may be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!”
I did eventually get a few people to join in on that one. I also got a lot of resistance from people who said, “I can’t write stories”.
On the question of “can’t write”, I tried to assure people that it didn’t matter about literacy, grammar, and whether or not they had written before. I asked them to try and a couple more did.
With a select couple, I also asked them to write, a brief account of a past relationship that was most memorable to them in some way either through happiness or hurt.
What I noticed and observed:
1. I knew a couple in big difficulties. They didn’t communicate well. They both wrote love stories, ones that had the outcomes they were seeking, about love as they wanted to experience it. The process of writing a story liberated their communication. They were able to talk about what they liked, what they wanted, and what they hoped for. It was all there in the stories. I got greedy! I suggested that they then wrote another fictional story together. I didn’t care how, but one where they joined their plots together. The result almost brought tears to my eyes.
This was a very special experiment as what this pair had managed to do was, not only understand the stories they carried within them, but they had expressed how they would like to go on writing…living their lives together.
By doing something this simple, I had done more than I had ever managed to do in my brief time in marriage or relationship counselling!
2. People who are able to construct a narrative story over their life experiences seem to get more benefit than those who were only able to write past accounts in literal terms.
3. Almost everyone who wrote stories seemed to discover new aspects of, or re-experience, their emotional selves in some profound way. Their ability to communicate their feelings and understand what they were seeking in love changed in a positive way. Most felt that they were able to go on and “write their next chapter”.
4. The exercise of writing past accounts in literal terms yielded some, but less benefit in this context. (I have more to say about this.)
More soon….
Most recently, I have been talking to other storywriters and to people who have spent much time in writing journals about painful or difficult experiences on-line as blogs to share with others. I have also talked to people who kept journals, or simply used writing as a means to express difficulties or come to terms with trauma.
Before that I had been considering the work of Robert Sternberg, who wrote the book, “Love is a story”.
Sternberg’s work interested me particularly as it was a dramatic departure from normal psychology methods. Traditional psychologists have tended to frame their questions, and establish empirical research that they tested for statistical validity, and used subsequently to formulate the premises of their arguments.
There are all sorts of problems with empirical research, a lot of which have to do with the propensity of the respondents to answer questions in terms of what they feel the right answers to be in accordance with social, cultural, religious, family and other personal norms, pressures and expectations.
I believe that Sternberg used an empirical approach, but it was not his starting point.
We are not born with knowledge of what love is, what it means, how to love and how to sustain love successfully.
We learn about it. At a very early age, we learn about it unconsciously from our experience of our parents, people with whom we come into contact, physical and tactile experience, and basic physical and social interaction with others. A little later we start to absorb other images from books, films, television, kindergarten, school and every other source of emotional and social experience.
Sternberg argues, and I have some affinity with his views, that, based on these early experiences, we assemble our views about love as forms of narrative systems, as stories, which we enact in our later lives. Thus compatibility becomes a matter of finding someone with a story that might live comfortably alongside our own.
In Sternberg’s work, for example, we have “garden” stories, where the emphasis is on planting, nurturing and growing. That’s a tender narrative, although it may be a little low on excitement for some.
We have a travel story where life is a journey, a never-ending movement of discovery. The destination is less important since the person gets their emotional sustenance from the journey itself. In terms of the twenty-five or so stories, that Sternberg cites, I find this one, possibly, one of the more attractive (for me).
There’s the war story where partners remain permanently in conflict, but nevertheless, to the astonishment of observers, stay in the relationship. Perhaps the war relationship is portrayed well in the play, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Where I might differ from Sternberg is that he argues the case that only experts like himself might interpret the stories that people have within them of which they are largely unconscious.
I’m not sure whether I believe that these stories are so unconscious, nor if they need the intercession of an expert to understand them.
I had another idea with which I experimented that yielded some interesting results. I wrote about it earlier here:
“It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our emotions and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our feelings without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should write a story, a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks only a story; one that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We may be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!”
I did eventually get a few people to join in on that one. I also got a lot of resistance from people who said, “I can’t write stories”.
On the question of “can’t write”, I tried to assure people that it didn’t matter about literacy, grammar, and whether or not they had written before. I asked them to try and a couple more did.
With a select couple, I also asked them to write, a brief account of a past relationship that was most memorable to them in some way either through happiness or hurt.
What I noticed and observed:
1. I knew a couple in big difficulties. They didn’t communicate well. They both wrote love stories, ones that had the outcomes they were seeking, about love as they wanted to experience it. The process of writing a story liberated their communication. They were able to talk about what they liked, what they wanted, and what they hoped for. It was all there in the stories. I got greedy! I suggested that they then wrote another fictional story together. I didn’t care how, but one where they joined their plots together. The result almost brought tears to my eyes.
This was a very special experiment as what this pair had managed to do was, not only understand the stories they carried within them, but they had expressed how they would like to go on writing…living their lives together.
By doing something this simple, I had done more than I had ever managed to do in my brief time in marriage or relationship counselling!
2. People who are able to construct a narrative story over their life experiences seem to get more benefit than those who were only able to write past accounts in literal terms.
3. Almost everyone who wrote stories seemed to discover new aspects of, or re-experience, their emotional selves in some profound way. Their ability to communicate their feelings and understand what they were seeking in love changed in a positive way. Most felt that they were able to go on and “write their next chapter”.
4. The exercise of writing past accounts in literal terms yielded some, but less benefit in this context. (I have more to say about this.)
More soon….
Tell me a story! - Part 1
28/07/08 00:36
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with stories for as long as I can remember. As soon as I was old enough to read books, I devoured them. I had my first library ticket when I was about six years old.
But this is not about the confessions of a bibliophile, even though I am one. I had this metaphor in my mind tonight of how I would like to take all of my writing here on psychology and put it in a food mixer in the hope that the blending process would turn it into some coherent and cogent whole. Needless to say, I teased myself with thoughts of making a psychology pudding! ‘How many calories would that be?’ I wondered. ‘Too many,' I expect.
For those of you who have not caught the plot so far, I have rejected the duality of objectivity and subjectivity in human understanding in favour of a model of intra-personal and inter-personal (social) constructs that I have described as “consciousness”. This is both an individual and collective consciousness that upholds all of our beliefs in the world including those about science, that change through time in relation to our historical circumstances. I cannot posit any causal or relational ideas about the development of mankind. I also believe that doing so leads one to a form of philosophical circularity where one attempts to make sense of the world through the dominant ideas of the time that tend to be self-proving. If one looks through a green glass, one undoubtedly will see green. Similarly, if one examines social or historical developments through a specific branch of science, it will return a result that conforms to and validates that particular scientific approach within the limits of its understanding.
I have a real difficulty with the subject of history. I know people who love history. They can construe the entirety of our human development in terms of “great” men and women. I always have the same nagging question. I think, “Well, that’s interesting about that one individual, I suppose. But what were the millions of other people doing and thinking about at the time?” Our view of history in terms of the acts of “great” people may also be about an ideology that “great” people make history. As such, it is what we have chosen to believe.
It’s a story. It’s no better nor worse than a certain sort of journalism.
There are all sorts of stories: There are science stories that are forever changing, history stories told from the perspective of “great” individuals; there are political, moral, national, economic, war and religious stories too. But they are all stories, bodies of beliefs generally cast in terms of the consciousness of the time.
Understanding the nature of stories, that may underpin our consciousness in the world, has a personal dimension too.
We all have our personal stories, many of us may live them – sometimes over and over as repeated patterns of behaviour, some of us may believe them to be inevitable, others may regard them as pathology or science.
I believe them to be of our making. Also I feel that the only way to move beyond our current struggles in the world is to step back and examine the beliefs that underpin them, to listen to our story and decide if it’s the one we want.
At a personal level, I believe our stories are accessible to our understanding and capable of change too. Whatever others may tell us, we are capable of self-understanding and change.
But this is not about the confessions of a bibliophile, even though I am one. I had this metaphor in my mind tonight of how I would like to take all of my writing here on psychology and put it in a food mixer in the hope that the blending process would turn it into some coherent and cogent whole. Needless to say, I teased myself with thoughts of making a psychology pudding! ‘How many calories would that be?’ I wondered. ‘Too many,' I expect.
For those of you who have not caught the plot so far, I have rejected the duality of objectivity and subjectivity in human understanding in favour of a model of intra-personal and inter-personal (social) constructs that I have described as “consciousness”. This is both an individual and collective consciousness that upholds all of our beliefs in the world including those about science, that change through time in relation to our historical circumstances. I cannot posit any causal or relational ideas about the development of mankind. I also believe that doing so leads one to a form of philosophical circularity where one attempts to make sense of the world through the dominant ideas of the time that tend to be self-proving. If one looks through a green glass, one undoubtedly will see green. Similarly, if one examines social or historical developments through a specific branch of science, it will return a result that conforms to and validates that particular scientific approach within the limits of its understanding.
I have a real difficulty with the subject of history. I know people who love history. They can construe the entirety of our human development in terms of “great” men and women. I always have the same nagging question. I think, “Well, that’s interesting about that one individual, I suppose. But what were the millions of other people doing and thinking about at the time?” Our view of history in terms of the acts of “great” people may also be about an ideology that “great” people make history. As such, it is what we have chosen to believe.
It’s a story. It’s no better nor worse than a certain sort of journalism.
There are all sorts of stories: There are science stories that are forever changing, history stories told from the perspective of “great” individuals; there are political, moral, national, economic, war and religious stories too. But they are all stories, bodies of beliefs generally cast in terms of the consciousness of the time.
Understanding the nature of stories, that may underpin our consciousness in the world, has a personal dimension too.
We all have our personal stories, many of us may live them – sometimes over and over as repeated patterns of behaviour, some of us may believe them to be inevitable, others may regard them as pathology or science.
I believe them to be of our making. Also I feel that the only way to move beyond our current struggles in the world is to step back and examine the beliefs that underpin them, to listen to our story and decide if it’s the one we want.
At a personal level, I believe our stories are accessible to our understanding and capable of change too. Whatever others may tell us, we are capable of self-understanding and change.