‘Human beings are storytelling creatures, that’s how we best learn, that’s how we best communicate. So when the storytellers in our society tell their stories, they end up having a powerful impact.’ Dr. Bruce Perry
I first met Natalie not long after I began working in the addiction recovery field at the turn of the new millennium. I was shocked to find that this attractive young woman was in early recovery from heroin addiction. She told me that when she was using heroin, she knew no one who had given up taking the drug. She stressed that there needed to be stories available on the internet so that people would feel hope that they could overcome their substance use problem, and learn how to do so. She told me that if I wanted to help people, I needed to start telling stories of people’s lives. I’ve been writing Recovery Stories ever since, including various versions of Natalie’s Story.
Natalie also emphasised to me that when your life has fallen apart and you are physically and mentally unwell, you have become isolated in your addiction, feel shame and disgust about yourself, and know that others think of you as nothing more than a ‘worthless junkie’, you give up on trying to change. It’s all too difficult; you see no escape. The easiest thing to do is to kill all the pain with more heroin, or more drink.
In his interesting book Healing the Mind Though the Power of Story: The Promise of Narrative Psychiatry, Dr Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who I hold in the highest regard, emphasises the importance of story. I describe below some of his reflections on the importance of story (pp. 2 – 4).
‘Stories help us to develop empathy. They allow us understand another person’s world from their perspective. Stories give us unique access to the inner lives and motivations of others. They contain so much more information than we can convey in the statement of facts.’
Stories give cognitive and emotional significance to experience. ‘Stories are amusing, memorable, and absorbing; they are also instructive, informative and orienting … We construct and negotiate our social identity through the stories we tell other people (and through the stories that then get repeated about us). Stories assist us in developing a moral sense, as they give moral weight and existential significance to actions and events.’
Stories enhance our creativity and help us think beyond the here and now. Stories ‘give us new vantage points from which to contemplate the possible and eventually create it. They stimulate our imagination and allow us to see alternatives. Without story, our lives and environments would be hideously drab and uninteresting.’
Stories keep us connected in social networks, which build and shape our brain. Our brain maps our social world as we explore and interpret it. ‘These social maps, which consist of stories that we have constructed about our experiences, guide our action in the world. By storing information about our social world in narrative form, we are able to quickly assess the motivation of others, their intent, how they make us feel, their status in our social hierarchy, their feelings about us, the context of the situation, and what behaviors would be considered normative.’
Stories unlock the mysteries of psychophysical suffering that declarative facts cannot reveal. ‘Social life is the performance of stories. Physiological life is the consequence of the performance of those stories.’
The relating of stories, in written, film and audio form, and in storytelling events, will form an important part of Atebion’s work. We have started our written Stories section, and will launch the film and audio forms in the near future.
You can find parts of both Natalie’s Story and Rich Price’s Story in this section. Saffron Roberts and Lee Daly began their recovery journey with North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC) in Bangor. Their ‘full’ Story will appear in the future, in the book I am writing about NWRC, Transforming Pain Into Power.