We Are a Storied People

We all need to make sense of our lived experience. from the earliest days of human development, we have told each other stories of what happened and what will happen. This process organizes our reality and links us with our concept of who we are. It links us to our place in space and time and in our community. A healthy story helps us to be our authentic self and grow through our trials with resilience and strength.

When we narrate our story, we can sometimes get stuck in patterns that create unhealthy self concepts. Sometimes our personal stories turn into a deep loss of our authentic self. Sometimes they become a testament to a perception of self that is dictated by a larger story. This kind of story is imposed into the psyche by families or cultures.

A common example of an imposed story is the one that tells (mostly girls) that their bodies are abnormal because they don't fit the privileged form of modern advertisers and media stars. people become compelled to fit into a skewed image and employ all kinds of unhealthy tactics that can end in death.

An unhealthy story comes from a couple of different places. Sometimes a person life experience is confusing and so chaotic that the story patterns and organization get lost in the chaos. Sometimes things happen to people during a time in their life when they are at a loss for words to describe the experience.

This holds true if the experience happened when the person was a child. As a child a trauma can be especially difficult to overcome because the youngster does not know what words to use to describe most encounters let alone chaotic and traumatizing ones.

This also happens with adult when the experience is so out of the ordinary that forming words around the situation seems impossible. An example of this might be living through the tornados that recently ran through my little county in Southwest Virginia. The devastation of so many homes and businesses is difficult to organize mentally because the sights and sounds feel otherworldly.

I use a system of templates to help people rewrite and organize their story. This helps them move forward and grow while identifying with healthy perceptions.

I plan to use this blog to describe the templates and patterns as I tweak and improve them throughout the next few months.