Narrative Medicine

Though humans cannot control what happens to them, perhaps people have agency over the story they tell. This is consequential because through narration, individuals may regain control over their reality without altering a single externality. Ultimately, stories help “orient us to what we perceive to be true, possible, and ideal” (Perceptions Institute, 2016).

Stories, whether they are recognized as such, are everywhere. People tell stories about their day, the news tells a story about the state of events, stereotypes seek to tell a story about groups of people (false as they may be), and religious texts tell a story about the inception of the planet as we know it. In this way, “we seek to explain the world to each other through narrative, whether we describe the stars as burning balls of gas, like Western scientists, or slivers of light dropped by Raven when the world was dark, like the Haida people of British Columbia” (Perceptions Institute, 2016).

This touches upon Narrative Therapy, a collaborative modality that explores how language is used to create and uphold problems. What came to be known as Narrative Therapy emerged in the 1980s by Michael White from Australia and David Epson from New Zealand. It is an approach that beholds therapeutic partners as empowered beings possessing the tools to become attuned to the themes in their current life story and the keys to re-narrate. Within this framework, the focus is on “people co-discovering through conversations, the hopeful, preferred, and previously unrecognized and hidden possibilities contained within themselves and unseen story lines” (Narrative Therapy Centre website).

Becoming attuned to the themes arising in our life stories can help us determine whether we are trapped in problem-centered stories, or whether we align ourselves with empowering stories. Though situational factors play a tremendous role in shaping life experiences, people are not unilaterally condemned to their circumstances. Two people may experience a similar life event differently depending upon the perspective they choose. For example, when sad occurrences happen, some people may gravitate towards a victim mentality, and others may cope through meaning-making. Though a victim mindset can be intoxicatingly tempting, an outlook of victimhood is insidious because it often leads to entitlement. In other words, feeling wronged might predispose an individual to believe that the world owes her something. Falling into the victim trap might lead to a narrow conceptualization of the world that misses how people tango with the environments they find themselves in, and in this way, can at least in part shape their future.

If you deem this post as optimistic hooey and yourself as minimally optimistic, do not fret. Rather than being an idiosyncratic nature of one’s personality, optimism can be a choice. And yes, with practice, your optimism muscles can be strengthened. Rabbi Nachman Breslov once said, “It is a great mitzvah to be happy.”

Reader, all the above is not to suggest that pain should be negated, nor is it to indicate that individuals do not possess real causes for feeling sorrow. Life can be a heart-wrenching journey, and everyday realities are not experienced on equal footing for individuals depending on the level of privilege vested to the individual by society. It is acceptable and even well-adapted to let pain be there, to recognize it, and to bear witness to it. And yet, at a point, a person may choose whether to transform the pain, the sorrow, the heartache, into a new form. Tzirah Firestone, author of Wounds into Wisdom, a book about intergenerational Jewish trauma, writes “As we become aware of our pain and harness the intensity we hold inside, we are no longer compelled to replay the same script” (Firestone, 2019). She compares pain to nuclear energy with massive transformational power. Beyond overcoming painful parts of the past, perhaps it is possible to transcend them by using them as springboards for growth.

Tell me, what is your story? What makes you uniquely you? In this mystifying, beautiful, unrelenting, wondrous, unpredictable journey we call life, it is possible to make meaning and seam together a coherent story of your time on Earth. If you open your heart and ears, you may find that each person you encounter has a story of their own. Listen closely to the framing, tone, and perspective undertaken by your conversation partner. You will find a story full of characters, plots, twists and turns, resolutions, and themes.

If you remember nothing else from these musings, at the very least take this Toni Morrison quote with you: “Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”