The Therapeutic Power of Stories

Art and science meet

Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

Stories hold a powerful sway over the human spirit. They reach us on the deepest levels, moving, inspiring, instructing, and even healing us, as modern therapeutic practice has shown. Stories and poems consolidate and interpret random occurrences and emotional and sensory activity—the raw inputs of experience—into a meaningful whole. This allows us to understand reality more deeply and to make sense of experience. Stories unveil patterns of meaning within collections of seemingly random events.

The discovery of meaning in the world and our lives might be described as the primary human pursuit and a key to mental and emotional health. Psychologist and Nazi death camp survivor Viktor Frankl argued as much in his pioneering book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s experiences in the prison camp, coupled with his reflections on those experiences, formed the basis for his school of psychotherapy called logotherapy. Logotherapy is based on the idea that our primary motivation as human beings is to find meaning.

Indeed, as Frankl witnessed in the prison camps, it is the one thing we cannot live without, the one thing we cannot be happy without. Prisoners in the camps could endure all sorts of physical deprivations and hardships, even the death of loved ones, but if they were unable to discover any meaning in their lives, they could not go on.

In logotherapy, then, practitioners aim to help their clients discover the meaning that lies latent in their lives, in spite of the shrouds of confusion, pain, or loss that might try to obscure it. As such, this is a psychological school quite compatible with religious belief, which, for many, provides an ultimate frame of reference for discovering meaning.

With this in mind, we can see how stories and storytelling occupy an important place in mental and emotional health. As a tool for uncovering meaning, stories help us find fulfillment through meaning and understanding. A great work of literature, for example, reflects the world back to us in a new way, allowing us to see it afresh, which is a process not unlike the psychological technique of “reframing.”

In addition, learning to see patterns in the lives of fictional characters is not so far from learning to see those patterns in our own lives. A great novel arranges events in a character’s life in such a way that they don’t appear contrived yet also adhere to a design and purpose in the mind of the author. Chaos ultimately gives way to order, and by the time we finish the novel, we are aware that the plot—though realistically spontaneous and free—was not mere chaos; there was a purpose and a meaning to it all. This can be an important skill with regard to our own experiences.

Psychologists have discovered that identifying a narrative pattern within our own lives can offer a remedy to trauma or other psychological and emotional difficulties. Some psychologists use a psychotherapy called Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) to treat individuals suffering from trauma disorders, especially complex and multiple trauma. In NET, individuals craft a coherent life narrative to contextualize their traumatic experiences, process them, and make sense of them. As the American Psychological Association explains:

With the guidance of the therapist, a patient establishes a chronological narrative of his or her life … this contextualizes the network of cognitive, affective and sensory memories of a patient’s trauma. By expressing the narrative, the patient fills in details of fragmentary memories and develops a coherent autobiographical story. In so doing, the memory of a traumatic episode is refined and understood.

Even for individuals who are not suffering from PTSD, autobiographical writing has been shown to provide benefits such as greater agency, self-knowledge, self-acceptance, emotional processing, and objectivity.

For instance, therapist Mark Tyrrell frequently uses storytelling in his sessions because stories can “bypass the shredding effects of over-analysis and conscious reasoning.” This can sometimes help a therapist reach a client on a deeper, more intuitive level. Stories shape not just our reason but also our imagination and emotions, making them powerful catalysts for change. As Tyrell puts it, “This makes story therapy the perfect device for delivering fresh patterns of hope as well as more specific suggestions for change.” Most of us have experienced a time when a story struck us in a way that mere facts or reasoning didn’t, remaining with us and even shaping our behaviors or beliefs.

There’s also a fascinating connection between stories and the healing power of dreams and REM sleep. Scientists have come to understand that dreams and the accompanying REM sleep command an important place in emotional health since they help us process difficult experiences.

Neuroscientist Matthew Walker explains, “REM-sleep dreaming appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning.” This is because, as Walker explains, our brains are completely free of the anxiety-inducing molecule noradrenaline during REM sleep. “This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical, which allows us to re-process upsetting memories in a safer, calmer environment.” As fragments from our day—including any painful experiences—reappear in the dream, they do so in a mental space free from anxiety, enabling us to regain some objectivity about them and integrate them better into our lives. In other words, the strange stories that waft through our minds at night actually serve as a kind of therapy for us.

So dreaming (a kind of storytelling) can help us heal and process difficult experiences. This appears to be part of our natural design, our emotional and psychological immune system. But extremely traumatic events can overload the system by which we manage and integrate our memories. In these cases, a disturbing experience might go unprocessed for years. As the Transformations Care Network describes it:

Rather than live in a verbal ‘story’ mode, [trauma experiences can] remain in a ‘raw’ and emotional form because they are isolated in the memory network associated with physical sensations and emotions, that is not connected to the cortex where we use language to hold memories.

That is to say, the process by which a bad experience is understood in language, making it part of our “story,” gets disrupted. So the experience remains in the realm of pure sensation and emotion, often repeatedly triggering a flight or fight response.

One treatment for this post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a relatively new form of therapy, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR is similar to the natural process that seems to take place through the combination of rapid eye movement (REM) and dreams in sleep. Through certain eye movements conducted while thinking or speaking about a trauma event, patients using EMDR are able to connect memory networks in the brain. This helps them reprocess the difficult memory, regain objectivity, and reduce the negative emotional impact of it.

All this indicates that science, psychology, philosophy, and literature coalesce around the importance of understanding our world and our selves through narrative. The success of treatments like NET or EMDR demonstrate how important it is for us to move our memories from the realm of pure sensation and emotion into the realm of language and story. We need to process our encounter with the world in terms of a narrative because narrative unlocks meaning. When that process is disrupted, it can affect our mental health because, as Frankl demonstrated, the most fundamental drive of a human being is toward meaning, understanding, and truth.

We are teleological beings. That is, we know intuitively that things (including ourselves) exist for some purpose, and until we identify that purpose, we remain frustrated. From ancient times to the present, stories have helped us see the pattern of purposefulness and causation present in the world, which leads to healthier, happier living.

Originally published on Intellectual Takeout: https://intellectualtakeout.org/2024/11/therapeutic-power-of-stories/