Story Work
When we experience pain or heartache, we can find ourselves moved beyond it by the current of life, before we have sufficient time to sit with the reality of what has happened. We’re used to being wounded and left to care for our wounds alone as life moves forward.
These wounds begin to happen when we’re children and don’t yet have the words to express our hurt. If we cry, we may be met with care, and the wound might receive the attention it needs to heal then and there.
Sometimes, though, we don’t receive that care, for any number of reasons. When this happens, the current moves us along, and we accumulate wounds that create a need to protect them, since we can’t heal them on our own. We develop ways of coping with these untended wounds that can disconnect us from ourselves and others, also trying to distance us from the pain. This is true of us all, spanning the full range of human experience and across all ages. From those who feel they’ve had a good life and a happy childhood to those who have borne severe wounds of abuse, trauma or neglect. No one passes through life without some experience of hurt and disappointment in how others have responded.
Benefits of Story Work
Moves you from isolation to connection with another person
Helps process emotions and reduce anxiety through co-regulation that was absent when the story first happened
Fosters self-understanding and validation of life experiences
Boosts brain function activating multiple areas that help to integrate your experience
Supports making meaning of life events
Meets your vulnerability with compassion and kindness
“Engaging your story is the single most important thing you can do to experience healing and freedom.”
— Adam Young
Story Work offers an opportunity to sit with an experience or event in your life that holds pain. It invites you to write a story, which you then share with a skilled and attentive listener experienced in receiving such stories with kindness and care.
Story Work is not therapy as it does not offer diagnosis or treatment of mental health diagnoses.
If you’re experiencing acute mental health symptoms impairing your ability to function in daily life, are suffering active addiction, or are seeking treatment for a mental health diagnosis, you need to see a therapist.
Story Work can provide additional benefit to the therapy you receive.
