When a short folk tale is told in the sacred space of therapy, the story hero can become a blueprint for identity insight and development. Clients are often confronting serious, and what feels like insurmountable problems. Like the central character of many stories, our clients can experience strong feelings of fear, anger, loss and despair. The survival, success and resolution for the hero keeps alive the client’s hopes and revitalizes their own quest.
Story listening provides a safe emotional work-out: focus and imagination are activated, breathing slows down, and the nervous system is calmed as the story concludes. Story metaphors enable ideas to bypass the ‘logical watchdog’ of the conscious brain. Although a story enters the mind like the Trojan Horse, the listener’s imagination is far from passive.
Some examples of research and therapeutic change from this method will also be presented. These include the benefits of story therapy to manage pain and distress, instill a calm response and foster inspiration.
Story Medicine has many distinct aspects that will be covered in this interactive presentation: the art of selecting and telling the story, the open-ended implicit messages woven into the story, the listener’s emotional connections to the characters, the ‘turning over’ of the story in their mind, and sometimes the magical ‘ah-ha’ of a new understanding of how to address a problem.
The last stage of the method includes the use of questions shaped by Narrative Therapy and the Hero Journey map initially created by Joseph Campbell to make sense of the archetypal journey from problem to resolution, and renewed identity through suffering and being supported by helpers along the way.
There will be an opportunity to practice telling a very short story with a small group in breakout rooms, and then use the provided questions to unpack the therapeutic changes from the listener’s point of view. A discussion about this practical experience and how client changes might be explored will conclude the presentation.
A selection of three stories will be provided and a link to the Hero Journey Map.
Experiential learning activities include: