Ambiguity Of Storytelling

What is storytelling? As defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, storytelling is simply “the activity of telling or writing stories” (Storytelling, 2014). However, it is much more than that. Storytelling is ambiguous; it can mean many different things to many different people. Whether one knows it or not, we are all storytellers. Storytelling is especially effective in the field of healing, specifically trauma. Through storytelling, people who have suffered great trauma utilize stories as an outlet to share otherwise painful memories and help them cope with reality. As the shift in society becomes more focused in fields like math and science, storytelling is losing its efficacy. Over the past two hundred years, Western civilization has begun …show more content…
It stores an infinite amount of moments, events, emotions, and more. Essentially, those are all of the elements of a story that is waiting to be told. That’s all memories really are, anyway: stories. As always in the case of stories, it is up to the person to decide whether or not they are willing to share them. No matter the circumstances, this always remains true. This conscious decision draws the line between secret and visibility. We keep secrets for many reasons. However, in the world that we live in today, it is not always easy for us to share the hard stories – those stories that have affected us on the deepest of levels, that remain ever present in our lives. This becomes even more true when we focus on the struggles survivors of violent trauma from warfare are forced to face. When their stories can’t be told, it only causes them more difficulties when it comes to their mental and even physical health (Brinkman et al., 2011). Survivors of trauma need to be able to have an outlet to comfortably share their stories, in a way that is best fit for them. It is all of our jobs to listen to them and to provide them with the proper resources for them to do this. Dr. James Pennebaker, a psychology professor and researcher, once created an experiment to test if writing about traumatic experiences and feelings reduced the amount of times the patients sought extra help. In an article written by Eric Jaffe, he says it included “...a …show more content…
However, healing can be just as much of a mental state as it can be physical. Telling our stories helps us heal. It releases some of the energy the experience created and begins to externalize the experience. In telling it, and giving the story to another, it is not ours alone. Someone is sharing it with us. According to Levinson, in enabling another to understand and have empathy, we move out of the sense of isolation the experience fostered into community, a requirement for healing (2011). In the last 20 years, medical practice has increasingly recognized the importance of what’s come to be called “narrative medicine” to the patient’s healing. Many medical schools such as Columbia University now have Narrative Medicine programs (Wimberly et al., 2011). Wimberly reported that Columbia’s “fortifies clinical practice with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret and be moved by the stories of illness” (2011). Recognition of the value of storytelling’s ability to heal is evident in the plethora of writing workshops for veterans that have sprung up across the country since troops began returning from deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Poet and author Maxine Hong Kingston began the first veterans writing project in 1993 in the Bay Area, where she witnessed the healing power of writing about war experiences and sharing them in a group (Cloyd, 2013). The program was called