Wounded Storytellers

Those who share and those who listen

"...As wounded, people may be cared for, but as story-tellers, they care for others. The ill, and all those who suffer can also be healers. Their injuries become the source of the potency of their stories. Through their stories, the ill create empathic bonds between themselves and their listeners. These bonds expand as the stories are retold. Those who listened then tell others, and the circle of shared experience widens. Because stories can heal, the wounded healer and wounded storyteller are not separate, but are different aspects of the same figure.

But telling does not come easy, and neither does listening. Seriously ill people are wounded not just in body in voice. They need to become storytellers in order to recover the voices that illness and its treatment often take away."

~Arthur W. Frank

I read this the other day in Frank’s book, The Wounded Storyteller. Even though he is a professor of sociology, I am struck by how much he honors stories and people’s lived, embodied experiences to form “theory.” (A very important foundational premise in my field, Cultural Rhetorics.)

Academics aside, I set with this quote and think about how stories do often pave the way to build bonds and foster empathy, especially when sharing personal stories of their personal wounds.

What is trauma but wounds?

I naturally gravitate to writing to process, meditate, work through my experiences, confusion, anger and grief.

But writing is also instrumental—as Frank suggests—to recovering our voices that the experiences of trauma and wounds often take away from us…even if it is temporary, only. In living through those experiences and holding that pain within your body, it often feels like our voice is stolen from us. As we try to process the magnitude of what has happened to us.

Writing through these experiences of being deeply wounded enables us to reclaim our power, our agency, our experiences and paves the way to healing, coping, surviving, a better way of coping, to better hopes for thriving.

I believe that, anyway.

But I also think this—if writing isn’t your thing then sharing and listening to stories can happen in so many ways—movies, podcasts, audio books, therapy, conversations, support groups, etc, etc.

But, truly, “stories are conduits of power.” (—Jo Hsu)

Storytelling is my religion. I believe they are all that we are (as Thomas King says) and stories are what truly make us human.