Healing through Storytelling
When we experience a traumatic or overwhelming event, our brains are not able to integrate the experience the way it does in a state of calm. The memory may end up feeling foggy and fragmented, or certain aspects of the memory might feel really vivid, almost like you are relieving it while losing other parts of what happened.
When this rupture happens, we are thrown into our limbic system which is one of the oldest structures of the brain that is responsible for helping us assess danger, our experience of memory, emotions and behaviors. This is very distressing to us as time goes on as our brains want to be able to tell a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end.
There are so many ways to heal from trauma. We know that helping facilitate integration is an important part of that journey, meaning that the individual is able to have a more cohesive and less distressing memory of the event. Often we tend to avoid bringing up hard things because we don’t want to upset people but the truth is that it is actually really important to be able to process through challenging events. It helps us not carry those events as a long term trauma. One of the ways of doing this is walking through the experience with a therapist or loved one that is grounded.
For example; if a child experiences a car accident, it can be really helpful in the following days for the parents to talk them through the experience from beginning to end while remaining grounded themselves and holding space for what the child might have been feeling. You might say, “Yesterday was a hard day. What do you remember about it?” Then carefully start filling in the pieces. “Yea, we were hit by that car and it was really scary, huh?” “Then mommy called 911 and so many helpers came to make sure that we were safe. Do you remember that? Then they took us to the hospital to get checked and grandma met us there and brought you your favorite stuffed animal. After we got checked out by all those wonderful doctors we were sent home and had our favorite dinner.”
As the child is telling their experience of the event, you are holding space for them, filling in the parts that maybe they missed and highlighting the safe people that were part of the experience. You then allow the child to bring it up as often as they need to to process the experience. This same strategy is also helpful for adult processing through overwhelming events. So many of us did not have this growing up and may even have a hard time finding people to hold space like this for us in our adult lives. There are many different types of therapy models that help facilitate this process for people. If this is something you think could be helpful on your healing journey we are here to help.
