The Stories We Tell - Do They Heal Us Or Hurt Us?

As a therapist, I've been thinking a lot lately about the stories my clients tell in their therapy sessions and how the telling of those stories (some for the very first time) can be an essential part of the healing process. To be clear, when I say 'story', I am in no way implying that what clients talk about in therapy is fictional. By 'story', what I really mean, is narrative.

Some people never get the opportunity to tell the story of their life to anyone. For some, speaking their truth out loud to friends, family or their community is simply not a safe thing to do. They may me judged or ridiculed; they may not be accepted and the risk of opening themselves up to others is just simply too big and so the story stays buried.

In the therapy room however, they can. It's my job to provide a safe space where they can talk openly about their past - warts and all - and can be assured that they will not be judged; they will be listened to with gentle curiosity, and supported. What they talk about is kept confidential and as a therapist, my job is to listen; to share my empathy and understanding and create a space where they feel at ease so that they can tell their story at their own pace.

It's through this storytelling that often clients make sense of things. Hearing their own story out loud seems to enable them to process the past and this is something I can very much relate to myself.

Some years ago, before I was a therapist, I went through a really difficult time. Life as I knew it changed forever and I was plunged into a period of darkness that took me a while to get through.

After struggling on for months - probably way longer than I should have - I finally reached out for some counselling as I felt I needed help in trying to make sense of what I was going through. I needed someone to listen to me pour out my emotions as I tried desperately to understand why my world was suddenly upside-down.

The counselling helped enormously. I had around ten sessions which saw me through the darkest days and was just enough to breathe some life back into me. It enabled me to get myself up off the sofa, get a new job, and re-join the land of the living after months of just existing.

At some point in my counselling journey, a fire was started inside of me and for the first time, I felt like I finally knew what I wanted to do with my life. I decided that I wanted to become a counsellor so that I could help other people through their dark days just like my counsellor had helped me.

During my four years of counselling training, I undertook another few rounds of therapy (a pre-requisite of my course) and every time I would tell the story of my heartache again and again to each new therapist and each time I did, I felt the weight shift from my shoulders slightly. However, it didn't disappear completely, and despite many, many sessions, it was still there.

In my mind I used to think of my story as a jumbled up ball of string that lived inside me; wound so tightly and with so many knots and kinks I wasn't sure if I would ever untangle the unruly mess.

I saw my therapy sessions as a place I could unravel just a little of what was going on inside, and inch by inch, straighten things out. Slowly but surely the mass of knots was gently teased out and untangled and the ball somehow got smaller and smaller.

Each round of counselling was a necessary step in my recovery and retelling my story was an integral part of it. With each period of therapy, I felt a sense of unburdening; I felt the peeling back of the layers. It was almost like a sense of purging - getting things out of me to somehow let the mere act of saying it out loud kill the power of my own thoughts.

On my journey I've learned that sometimes we have to tell our stories more than once to be able to heal from them. This is what it was like for me. I needed to tell my story again and again; each time, its grip on me loosening ever-so-slightly.

There came a point with my last counsellor however, where my relationship with my story felt different. It felt like it was no longer serving me to be so wrapped up in it. The story had become a big part of my identity and I no longer wanted this to be the defining narrative of my life. In truth, this was a little scary because, without it, who was I?

Sure this part of my life was painful, but it wasn't my whole life. I was so entwined with the story of my past that it had taken over and I felt like my story was in the driving seat; not me. It was defining who I was as a person and it didn't feel right anymore. I wasn't the same person - I had evolved.

I felt like I was becoming a broken record. I had given my story so much air time that even I was getting sick of hearing it!

It was at this point that it hit me that I didn't have to make this the story of my life. I could choose to put the load down now if I wanted to - and boy did I want to! It was just such a heavy weight to carry.

Telling my story had helped me to understand my past, had offered great insight and self-awareness but I had reached a point where retelling it was no longer helping. I decided after many, many hours of therapy to finally let it go.

I think we run the risk of inadvertently becoming prisoners to our pasts and while I don't want to downplay or invalidate anyone's experiences or suffering, I've realised that replaying the past over and over while maybe helpful at times, also means we run the risk of becoming shackled to it.

Sometimes I think we are reluctant to give up our story because we aren't sure who we are without it but this is what therapy is for. It's a place for exploration and transformation. We can become whoever we want.

There's a kind of safety and security in our stories - as painful as they may be - and remaining firmly wrapped up in them gives us justification and validation for our feelings. We are allowed to play the victim because that's how we have cast ourselves in the story. True liberation comes however, when we decide that in order to move on, we must first let the story burn.

So I ask, what is hanging on to your story doing for you? How is it helping? Is it aiding your recovery or holding you hostage keeping you locked in a repetitive cycle? What will you loose by letting it go? What will you gain? Who are you without it?

Our stories can shape us but they don't have to define us. The power to write the next chapter is firmly in our grasp. But we must be willing to give up the ghost and embrace the blank page before us. One thing I know for sure is that human beings are resilient and we truly have more power over ourselves than we realise.

What will you do with your blank page?