In Troubled Times: How Stories Save Us

I first posted this in August, 2021. Hold on to hope!

Stories can heal and transform us. They can also become beacons of hope.

Quite a few years ago, when I was going through a difficult personal time, I came across a book about the inherent healing power of telling our stories. No matter how scattered or flawed our lives may appear, as we tell our stories, we gain something. Patterns emerge from seeming chaos, and our lives begin to make sense. It may be dreadful, agonizing sense, but even tragedies have order and consequence. I found that over time, the way I told my story changed, reflecting my recovery process and new insight.

The mirror side of story-telling is story-listening. While a confidential diary or journal can be highly useful, having someone hear our words can be transformative, especially if all that person does is listening. Not judging, not analyzing, not wondering how to respond, just taking in our words, a silent partner on our journey. Often we feel less alone in retrospect, no matter how isolated and desperate we might have been at the time. Additionally, a compassionate listener invites us to be kinder with ourselves.

Perhaps this is how Twelve Step programs work, apart from any Higher Power mysticism or Steps: that by simply hearing our own voices relate our histories, and having the experience of being heard, we open the door to viewing ourselves through the lens of new possibilities.

Personal storytelling calls for discretion, of course. Although it may be true that “we are only as sick as our secrets,” casually (or not-so-casually) violating a confidence from someone else is not the same as choosing to include the listener in our own private lives. Some of us never learned healthy boundaries about what is safe to share, and when, and with whom. We, or others, can be harmed by indiscriminate broadcasting of embarrassing, illegal, or otherwise sensitive information. The kind of storytelling I’m talking about, on the other hand, is as much about the journey as it is the facts.

Stories can get us through dark times by giving us hope and inspiring empathy. Stories work by creating a bond between the narrator or central character and the listener/reader. Who wants to read a story about a person you care nothing about? And if that appealing character has a different history or journey, or learns something the reader never experienced, so much the better. We accompany them into darkness and out again.

[guest post] Judith Tarr on Story

Writer Brain: The Power of Story

by Judith Tarr

Story helps us process trauma and understand the world. I've been thinking more about what Story is, and what it does. And how as far as we can know, it's unique to humans.

We may find out that other animals tell each other stories, too. For now, we seem to be the only species that tells itself things that aren't true, but that contain a deeper truth. It may be a factor of the way our brains are constructed. We can think in layers. We can know what is, but also what might be or could be--and what couldn't possibly be except in our imagination.

It can be hard to tell what's true and what's not. We have a powerful capacity for self-deception, which can be dangerous. Consider the Big Lie. It's a deliberate falsehood that's told to serve a purpose, usually political or financial; that's repeated over and over until the people who are lied to believe it's true.

Which, yes, has something to do with the events of this month.

But I'm talking about Story here. About the lie that is, in its essence, true. It creates worlds and characters. It invents histories. It fabricates languages that can take on lives of their own.

People are out there speaking Klingon and more than one dialect of Elvish. They're living in our world but speaking words that came from the mind or minds of humans who imagined how alien beings would think and talk. It's a strange thing, but it's beautiful. It's a lie but it's true.

The image I chose for this post exists in multiple worlds. In this one it's a piece of jet contrail that caught the wind and attached itself to wisps of cloud. The light of the setting sun struck the ice crystals and give them the illusion of color, even while the wind made it seem to be moving steadily westward.

In another world, the world of Story, it's a dragon. Can you see the shape of it? The long neck. The snaky tail. The wings. It comes from the west and it's flying east over the mountains.

I don't know where it started or where it's aiming to go. But because I have the power of Story, I can imagine. I can invent a world for it to come from and a reason for it to be flying over this land, on this evening. I can make up a destination for it, and tell the story of what happens to it when it gets there.

Maybe it's a happy story. It's bringing good news to people who are waiting eagerly for it. Or maybe it's a tragedy. Something terrible happened, and it's warning the people in the east. Or it's a monster story, and it's hunting, and its prey is running away in front of it.

Personally I like the more optimistic kinds of stories. I understand and appreciate the need for the darker ones, for the way they shed light on our own darker impulses. But I lean more toward good news than bad. There will pretty definitely be darker moments, crises and reversals, but my mind wants them to end more happily than they began.

I know that every story can't and won't have a happy ending. Real life can hit hard. But one function of Story is to make it possible to withstand the hits. To find a way through. To face problems and, if at all possible, solve them.

Even if they can't be solved, at least we can try. We can imagine alternatives. We can hope.

Story helps us do that. That's its power.

That's why I'm writing fiction again. So that I can process what's happening. Deal with the hard parts. Find ways to make them less hard. And share those ways with other people, many of whom will share their own ways with me. And maybe, among all of us, we'll end up in a better place than we began.

Judith Tarr is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. She has a Patreon, where she shares fiction, nonfiction (like this blog), and (of course) cute cat pictures.

https://www.patreon.com/dancinghorse . 

She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzan horses, a small clowder of cats, and two Very Good Dogs.

Reprinted by permission

Anxiety, Curiosity, and Creativity

Recently I wrote about “Election Anxiety Disorder,” characterized by – among other things – obsessively checking news sources, social media, polling results, election prediction sites, and the like. Our simian brains seem to be hardwired to zoom in on changes, even small ones, in our environments. Fast-changing visual media like news programs and advertisements rely on this response to attract and hold our attention. In the same way our ancestors might have scanned the horizon for the movement of herds of prey animals or signs of a stalking predator, we scan our information horizon for signs of threat (or reassurance). So it can be difficult to tear ourselves away from that screen or newspaper, particularly when our lives are in so many other ways attached to the flow of information. For many of us, this constant reactivation and connection with sources of perceived threat our anxiety. However, some people use information as a way of managing their anxiety. 

There are many styles of dealing with anxiety, from purely physical to purely intellectual, with pharmaceutical – legal or otherwise – thrown in there, too. I should modify that statement to say these are starting points. Deep, slow breathing and concomitant decreases in blood pressure, heart rate, adrenaline secretion, etc., also affects our thoughts. Talking ourselves through a stressful situation or changing how we think about ourselves or the problems we face also reduces the physiological symptoms of anxiety. No matter where we begin, we end up at the same place.

As I mentioned above, one way to manage anxiety is through information. If we can find out more about something that worries us, often it becomes less threatening. (Not always, of course.) Our fears can distort perceptions and amplify dangers, but information acts as an antidote. It also suggests logical, effective actions to deal with the problem, things that are more likely to be successful than just flying off the handle. Our minds reassure us of our ability to cope with the situation, and the resulting calm further increases our likelihood of success.