Recreating Our Stories To Reshape Our Lives

Marguerite Theophil

We are motivated to make decisions and to take action, consciously or otherwise, by the stories we repeatedly tell or hear. Therefore, we need to be attentive to just what those stories are. Stories we tell about ourselves and those that other people tell about us deeply affect how we live. Telling our stories of pain and sorrow once or twice is healing; telling them again and again is allowing that one part of our lives to determine how we see ourselves, or sadly, what we focus on or expect our lives to be like in the future. Sometimes the healing retellings come from outside, like in the story of Opalanga, whose story is told by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, author of that engaging book on story, Women Who Run With The Wolves. Unusually tall and slender, as a child Opalanga was teased, and also told that the gap between her front teeth was the sign of a liar. However, as an adult she visited the Gambia and there found some of her ancestral people, many of whom were very tall and slender, with gaps between their front teeth. This gap, they called ‘sakaya yallah’ or ‘opening of God’; to them it was a sign of wisdom. Pinkola-Estes comments on the consequences of such revision: “...stories which began as experiences both oppressive and depressive end with joy and a strong sense of self. Opalanga understands that her height is her beauty, her smile one of wisdom, and that the voice of God is always close to her lips”. She offers this as an example of how easily we become ‘caught in a story’ and that the toxicity of attributions is even more disruptive and destructive if they are told to us early and authoritatively. Often with young children and teenagers, while it may be counterproductive to have them change the details of what has already happened to them, it is useful to have them recreate outcomes, or possible new endings. A young girl who worked with me for over two years first told me that her name meant “clouds” and that clouds “made the sky dark and unhappy, bringing destruction whenever they appeared”. An older family member had cruelly repeated that her father had lost his business the day this daughter was born! As we worked over many months, among other things with yoga, story and with symbols, drawing and painting, her clouds now and then were less grey and menacing. Later, the bottom of the page had a few fragile green things growing, a bird or two became visible in the sky, and much later her story was: “Clouds give welcome shade, they bring life-giving rain, they can make people happy”. Stories — personal or cultural — shape our perceptions. In fact, stories of the collective very easily slide into propaganda and dogma when viewed from one single perspective. In truth, it is often said, “The people who tell the story shape the culture”. Historically, many retold stories slip from pain and suffering into a perpetuating of hate and reprisal, as we see in so many cultural and religious or ethnic clashes the world over today. And ridiculously, the same people who keep telling those stories of hate and revenge on Monday, on Tuesday talk of creating peace! Healing our lives and world does not mean an avoidance of talking suffering and abuse; it does involve also telling of how we found — or are going to find — the strength to rise above this and how we want to put an end to generating such a cruel and endlessly retaliatory world.