Why Telling our Stories can be Healing
I met this amazing young woman, Sarah Thebarge, at a writers’ conference in Portland a couple years ago. She taught a coaching class entitled “The Healing Power of Your Story”—eight hours spread over three days with in-depth instruction, writing exercises, and critique.
Sarah said this about the value of story-sharing:
“Writing turns wounds into scars. Wounds are raw, painful, losing blood. Scars don’t get infected, you can touch them, they’re not painful.”
So, how can telling our stories bring healing?
From the combined wisdom of Sarah and my classmates—fellow writers who had experienced child abuse, lost families, mental health issues, abandonment—telling our stories does several things:
1. Causes shame to lose its power
We often think if people really knew us, they probably wouldn’t like us. Simply not true.
2. Helps us accept what happened
The events that have taken place, have taken place. We can change nothing from the past. We have power only to shape what’s ahead.
3. Frees us to be fully known
Instead of hiding behind a façade, telling our stories sets us free from the power our past had over us, free from worrying about what others might think of us, free to be us.
4. Creates community
The strength of community is hearing someone say, “I get it.”
5. Distributes the weight of our burden
We were never designed to lug this heavy thing around on our own.
6. Dispels the lies
You know, the lies that sneer, “This is as good as it gets,” and “Everyone will detest you if you let them know what you’re really like.” Those lies are scattered when we speak the raw truth about ourselves and our hurts.
7. Provides validation
These are our stories. They’re worth telling. They’re beautiful stories of redemption, of becoming whole again.
Sarah shared a poem with the class – “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. It resonated with me because I once thought, “How can the world go on?"
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Meanwhile, as we’re going through the most devastating things in our lives, the geese keep flying, the sun shines and the rain falls. And the world goes on.
And we think, “How can you go on as if nothing happened? How can the school buses still pick up kids? How can the autumn leaves keep drifting downward? How can people still laugh, congregated around tables in my favorite outdoor café?
Because life goes on.
And we wouldn’t want it any other way. We are grateful that laughter will return, and hopes and dreams will revive, and we will love still. Again.
Sarah’s own story—as told in her book, The Invisible Girls: A Memoir—is about surviving breast cancer and a failed relationship on the East Coast, about fleeing her successful career and Ivy League education to start over in Portland, Oregon.
While riding the Metro, Sarah met Hadhi, a Somali refugee abandoned by her husband, struggling to raise five young daughters in a culture she didn’t understand. On the brink of starvation and ‘invisible’ in a neighborhood of strangers, Sarah helped Hadhi and the girls navigate American life. And in doing so, God brought healing to her own brokenness.
Sarah shared this thought from Madeline L’Engle, poet and author:
“The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.”
What about you? What is your story and who would benefit from hearing it?
