Telling our stories brings healing to our woundedness.​

Telling our stories Telling our stories brings healing to our woundedness.​

By Patrice Rancour

​“The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed.” — Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel Is it any wonder that the PBS Masterpiece Theater program “Call the Midwife” has piqued the interest of the public? In these stories, written more than a half-century ago, viewers see their own stories—birth, death, suffering, joy, tragedy, humor, mystery—the gritty pathos of day-to-day life, so often lived in quiet desperation. And they see us—nurses and midwives—right in there with them, living with them, birthing their babies, ministering to their sick and wounded, and helping them, at the end of their lives, to cross the threshold into the unknown. The series demonstrates in a very real way that the bulk of health care still takes place in homes and communities where people live, work, and play—not merely in doctors’ offices. This is why, except for the tragedy of 9/11, when firefighters rightly took front stage, the public continues to identify, year after year, nurses as the most trusted professionals. And yet, our work typically remains invisible to most people, until they need us. Which brings me to my point. The healing power of story When we share our stories—with each other and the public—we accomplish a number of things. The power of writing and telling stories about our work lies in the compelling power of healing they evoke. There is an old proverb: “In the hearing is the learning, but in the telling is the healing.” In the telling of our stories, woundedness—ours and theirs—is distilled, allowed to bubble up from regions of unconsciousness, where, as we shed light upon it, it can be transformed, released, and healed. I have written extensively elsewhere about my work with patients, asking them to write narratives about their illness experiences—to write letters to parts of their bodies they struggle with, to people with whom they are in conflict, even to people who have died. This ability to write one’s story is powerful in that it seeks after meaning and coherence and gives people who often feel mute and powerless a voice. James Pennebaker’s work on journaling demonstrates that patients who journal about their health issues require far less treatment—even as much as six months less—than people who don’t write about them. Such people become the heroes of their own stories and define themselves as such, rather than letting someone else define them as victims. This is true not only of patients, but of ourselves as well. It is an error in judgment to believe that coming into contact with so much suffering does not affect us. We can bear suffering inasmuch as we find meaning in it. Giving voice to our stories helps us preserve our individual and group energies and defends us from the rigors of compassion fatigue and burnout. The act of writing about these experiences elevates our response to illness experiences, moving such descriptions from the merely banal to tales of heroic journeying. When I listen to nurses share such stories, I often hear them say that they feel privileged or humbled in being allowed entrée into peoples’ sacred spaces. This self-reflection inoculates nurses against the very real occupational hazard of contact trauma. Such stuff leads to peak—rather than bleak—experiences, not only for our patients but also for our selves. And it allows us to come back and work yet again, another day. Story as teaching tool Telling our stories to one another and to the lay public becomes a teaching tool. If you are old enough, you probably remember those odious process recordings of yore: assignments demanded by an earlier cohort of fastidious nursing instructors that required us to write down, painfully, entire verbatim conversations between ourselves—as students—and our patients. Columns identifying feelings generated, assessments made, and how these translated into action followed. Voilà, the nursing process (also known as critical thinking). In these days of bulleting and texting, I fear that such critical thinking is getting lost in the translation. Reliance on technology and pharmacology is eliminating the use of self as therapeutic tool. Writing and telling our stories takes us back to a time of self-empowerment that comes with knowing there is virtually no room I can enter in which suffering cannot be reduced just by virtue of my being intentionally and therapeutically present. Telling stories about how this is accomplished is crucial to mentoring succeeding generations. All the computer programs in the world cannot help a medical or nursing student who is asked to have an end-of-life discussion with a patient when all that the student wants to know is, “But when she asks if she’s dying, what do I say?” Telling stories about how these interactions occur is a means for providing such students with not only information but also the self-reflective practice tools that help us all become more self-aware, learn to center, use language as a healing modality, use words to help one another derive meaning—and, therefore, transcendence—especially in the face of fear, uncertainty, or death. So when I write about my work, I am not necessarily seeking merely after facts, but rather after the truth of the experience. Story telling is what gets to this. As sociologist William Bruce Cameron observed, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” In a world of measurement mania and outcomes obsession, story-telling can get to the truth. Story as cultural mediator Lastly, when we share our stories with one another, we create a pool of shared experience in which we develop a culture of values that is passed on from one generation of nurses to the next. When we tell each other our stories, we are pooling and preserving a group culture and collective wisdom that strengthen us and help us resist powerlessness. Sharing our stories creates continuity and ensures that the essence of what we do is captured in self-reflective practice. The stories we tell one another about ourselves lift us up. The stories we share with the public about the work we do give them a voice in telling their own health and illness stories. And, in that respect, such stories evoke healing, not fear, for all of us. So, tell us and one another your stories. Use words for the purpose of healing, to evoke hope, to help one another and your patients move through grief, make sense of the inexplicable, and make the world whole again. RNL Patrice Rancour, MS, RN, PMHCNS-BC, clinical assistant professor in the College of Nursing at The Ohio State University (OSU), is a behavioral health and Reiki therapist at The OSU Center for Integrative Medicine. She is the author of Tales from the Pager Chronicles, published by Sigma Theta Tau International.