The Power of Stories
Stories can help us heal from painful life events. They can also divide us and lead to great harm.
On a dark and painfully cold night, in a field turned muddy by torrential rain, a young Syrian Kurdish journalist was running for his life. He’d just slipped through a barbed wire fence into Turkey, and Turkish border guards were closing in on him quickly. Realizing they might shoot him if he kept running, he stopped, raising his hands in surrender. The guards beat him ferociously, kicking him as he lay curled up in the mud, trying to protect himself from their boots and rifle butts. Then he heard the click of a Kalashnikov, and felt the nozzle of the gun against his head. He shut his eyes in terror, expecting to die. The explosion of the gunshot was followed by sadistic laughter, and he realized the gun had been raised at the last moment, shooting above his head into the air. The beating resumed, until eventually he was brought back to the border and made to slip through the same barbed wire fence back into Syria. Bruised, bloodied, and badly frightened, he eventually made his way home.
A few weeks later, with the help of a well-paid smuggler, he found a different crossing, and safely escaped the war that was destroying his homeland. He found his way to a workshop I was co-leading in southern Turkey for Syrian journalists. That’s where we met, and where, over tea and stories in a dimly lit café, we became friends. He shared his trauma of the brutal night in the muddy field, and seemed relieved as he gradually unburdened himself. A few days later, back home in Amsterdam, I received a text message from him, saying he felt relieved after our conversation; he was no longer carrying his memory of that brutal night like a lonely and overwhelming secret.
Stories are powerful. They link us together, allowing us to know and be known.
Stories are powerful. They link us together, allowing us to know and be known, to make sense of how we got from where we began to where we are now. They create meaning out of chaos, as we fashion a coherent narrative out of events that were confusing, painful, or difficult to comprehend. By sharing our most intimate stories with trustworthy others, we release their power, the grip they may hold on our waking and sleeping lives. Traumatic events become tolerable memories, unsettling but not overwhelming. We may even gain wisdom from difficult stories, a silver lining around painful life events, a wisdom imperceptible in the immediate aftermath but clearer and deeper with the passing of time.
I think of my friend Samad Khan in Afghanistan, who lost much of his family on one terrible day in the war against the Soviet Union. Forced to stop his pickup truck at a military checkpoint on a winding and narrow mountain pass, he forgot to set the hand brake and watched in horror as the truck spiraled off the side of the road and crashed hundreds of feet below, killing everyone inside. Devastated at first, he dug deep into his faith, fell back on the love and support of his extended family, and became an impassioned advocate for peace and a deeply empathic community leader. He tells the story of that terrible day on the mountainside with sadness, but it no longer overwhelms him, or pulls him back into the past. It’s one tragic chapter in an ongoing life story that once again has moments of joy and laughter.
Much has been written about the power of therapy as a process of helping people to create meaningful narratives out of the events of their lives, linking past to present, and finding news ways to understand old experiences (“changing the narrative”). As I wrote about in a previous post (“What Are the Essential Qualities of Effective Therapists?”), there is compelling research showing that you needn’t be a mental health professional to be a helpful listener — to create a safe space for someone to share and reflect upon their stories. You do need a willingness to listen without judgment (not easy!) and with compassion, which is not without risks-opening our hearts to the painful experiences of others can be uncomfortable.
We can all offer this sort of listening to the people in our lives. It’s not magic or mysterious, and yet its power is remarkable.
If you can offer this to others, you offer a great gift. There was nothing mysterious or uniquely skilled about how I sat with my Syrian friend that night in the Turkish café; I just listened, inquired gently, and allowed myself to experience whatever feelings his story evoked: sadness, admiration, anger at the guards, and appreciation that he was willing to share his story with me. We can all offer this sort of listening to the people in our lives. It’s not magic or mysterious, and yet its power is remarkable.
Stories can also divide us, of course. We create, or are told, stories of dangerous “others” who threaten our safety. Sometimes the stories are true, and the danger is real. Then the stories are useful, and we can take actions to protect ourselves and those we care about. Sometimes, however, the stories are fictitious, fashioned by skilled storytellers who play on our fears and vulnerabilities. Totalitarian regimes specialize in the creation and dissemination of such stories. I have spent much of my career working with survivors of the fear and violence that such stories can generate: Bosnian Muslims who were portrayed as a radical Islamist threat to Serbs, who reacted with fear and eventually with genocidal violence; Guatemalan Indians who were depicted as subversives, subhuman, and a barrier to the country’s modernization, and were massacred or driven into exile; Afghans, Syrians, and Iraqis described en masse as infidels or terrorists, victimized in their own country and denied safe haven elsewhere, or left to die at sea, or to exist in the nowhere-land of refugee camps.
Power-hungry nationalist leaders offer protection against threats they have fashioned for their own purposes, and we must do our best to discover what is true and what is not. This represents one of the most pressing challenges of our time: how to separate the stories that heal or protect, from those that divide and destroy.
Originally published at https://www.psychologytoday.com.
