WAKING UP HAPPY: Tell It with a Story

THE PROFILE:  Your Pain Won’t End Until You Tell Your Story: Wisdom from Adam

From my first experiences with AA, I was riveted by the stories. Many people’s narratives were heartrending, yet at the same time their wisdom awed me. How, I wondered, did so many ordinary-looking people grow so wise? How did they manage to reach so deeply into my heart and capture what I thought was mine alone? And how did these people find such a sense of joy and hope?

As I listened and gained the courage to tell my own story, I found the experience incredibly healing. I saw that sharing tales of hard times -- and of experiences that made me feel guilty -- lessened the pain and shame, while poking fun at myself with anecdotes, laughing at my failings, gave me a wonderful sense of release.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. . . . 

  – Isak Dinesen

THE KEYS:

1. There’s nothing like a story to make an unforgettable point. That’s why support groups, mentoring programs, and coaching are such potent ways to produce lasting change. Stories point up the common ground we all share, drawing us together. People who attend support groups say that as they listen to stories unspool like soft yarn, they often feel they are hearing their own words in another voice. 

2. Keep telling your stories. Stories from your life help others learn important lessons. They also help you create your own mythology, turning your life from a struggle to an adventure, becoming the hero of your life rather than a victim. It’s all in how you spin the story!

3. Keep memory alive. Tell stories about your family’s heritage. Serve food made with old family recipes, and if there’s a story connected to a recipe, jot it down, and pass it along. A feeling of connection to the past gives us all a rootedness that keeps us strong during the storms of life.

4. Clarify, articulate, and recast hidden family stories. We all walk around with our family stories under our skin, invisible as air, weightless as dreams, as Elizabeth Stone tells us in Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us. Those tales are all the more powerful for being shrouded, unacknowledged, and intangible. They send clear – even if subliminal – messages. Some examples:

• You will care for your parents in their old age (or feel guilty if you don’t).
• You will have a large family (or the reverse).
• As a woman, you’ll stay home to take care of the family. As a man, you’ll earn a good living and spend most of your time at work.
• You’ll stay close to the place where you are born. (Or, the message I received in my family: The smart ones move as far away from home as possible!)

Every family has its own “family traits” – for instance, hard-working, adventurous, aggressive, or rebellious. In my family, almost exclusively Pennsylvania Dutch stock, I knew that we Obrights were stubborn, and for a long time I viewed my own stubbornness as a good thing, a sign of pride and high-minded principles, as well as a badge of belonging to a long tradition. It was only when I saw this trait mirrored in my daughter that I began to see how self-destructive it was and let myself abandon it as a positive strategy. What helped the most was that my husband was able to joke about it and tease my daughter and me when we butted heads. The more I saw myself from his perspective, the more I understood how I had sabotaged myself through my inflexibility. Indeed, a light-hearted look at the consequences of family traits is a good way to start demystifying family legends.

Families all have their “black sheep,” too – those who broke the rules – and anecdotes about them serve as cautionary tales. But these stories can also provide comfort, as they did for me, proving that it is possible to move outside the lines and survive. Among the black sheep in my family was my cousin Jeanne, the only woman in our family at the time to get divorced. She was also a successful artist, which made me admire her, so when I followed in her footsteps, as the second divorcee in the family, I didn’t feel like a complete misfit.

Give yourself permission to move beyond old family stories and create new ones for yourself. Give others that same license. You needn’t give up the traditions completely, but be flexible in shaping them to meet your needs. Use them as an inspiration rather than a straitjacket.

5. Help your loved ones find, live, and tell their own stories. Help them break free of rigid roles by becoming aware of expectations embedded in old stories. Remind them that they can paint the same picture in innumerable ways. They can go beyond the stories they’ve been telling themselves and remake them into tales that fulfill their needs.

6. Always put stories into context. Whenever you tell a story, don’t stop talking when you reach what you may think is the end. Ask your listeners what the story means to them, what they’ve drawn from it, and how they might use it in their own lives. Underline the fact that every story has multiple messages, and they can take away one that’s most meaningful for them. If the message is negative, help them see how they can turn it into a positive.  For instance, stories that paint ancestors as failures and sufferers can be refashioned into tales of courage, vigilance, and survival in the face of hardship. Likewise, “odd and different” can be seen as “unique, special, and distinctive.”

ACTIONS TO PRACTICE:

1. Make a commitment to talk to your parents and other relatives and ask them to tell you stories about your family, your ancestors, and what they remember about you as a child. It can be especially helpful to talk to relatives who are estranged or have moved a far distance away. They may have stories they’ve been dying to tell and were only waiting to be asked. In my case, when I made the effort to talk to relatives I had never even met, the stories I discovered gave me entirely new perspectives on my life and changed everything for me. I also discovered that my mother, who deflected all my questions as I was growing up, became eager to tell family stories in her last years. I was amazed at all the stories that poured out of my private, secretive mother and how those new tales helped me make sense of my life.

2. Make a list of family traits and messages that were passed on to you, either explicitly or implicitly. How can you build on these themes in a positive way? If you consider the messages negative, how can you reframe them in a more constructive way?

3. Set up a time to meet with your children (or other loved ones) and discuss family stories. Have everyone write down a few stories beforehand to read aloud when you get together. It may be enlightening to have everyone tell the story of a shared experience. You may be surprised at how differently you each remember what happened – and what different meanings you attach to it.

4. If you have advice you’d like to pass on to someone, take time to make up a story whose moral sums up what you want to impart. Stories are a wonderful way to pass on vital lessons in a form more palatable than lecturing or seeming to give advice. The story can come from your own life experience, or you can pretend the story happened to someone you know. (Stories don’t have to be literally true. The magic of stories is that, by being more metaphorical than literal, they’re often more useful than the facts would be.)

5. Some of the best stories describe mistakes that turned out to be learning experiences. Think of a mistake you made, and turn it into a story that will help people laugh and learn.

6. Write the story of your life in the third person, using “he” or “she” rather than “I” to describe what happened to you. When you see yourself from an objective distance, it’s easier to feel compassion for yourself and what has happened in your life, and it may help you rework your story to better advantage. We’ll discuss this exercise in more detail in upcoming blogs. 

For more exercises, take a look at WAKING UP HAPPY, which includes “365 Steps on Your Journey” (an exercise for every day of the year), “What Works and What Doesn’t” (a discussion of conventional change methods that don’t work and surprising ones that have been proven to lead to true transformation), over 30 memoirs of people who have changed their lives and concrete steps to creating the same changes in the lives of others, along with a table of contents so that you can find an exercise for whatever problem you’re wrestling with today. For more info, email Jill@NonprofitWorld.org or see www.WakingUpHappyBook.co.

Please contact me with your own stories, strategies, insights, and any questions you may have, as well as an answer to this question, if you’d like to reflect on it and send me your answer:

What story has shaped you more than any other? Has that story changed throughout your life?