This chronicling of experience develops the family's history into a framework for meaning making. Collaborative storytelling allows for each member to share a perspective of the experience, including the emotions attached, which then allows the family to develop a shared understanding of events. Family stories illuminate the content (the details of “what happened”), the affect (the “how it felt”), as well as the meaning (the family's sense of “why this happened”). Family storytelling gives us access to the multiple meanings of family experience while building a shared theory to explain the meaning of life events to the family as a whole ( Boss, Beaulieu, Wieling, Turner, & LaCruz, 2003 Fiese & Sameroff, 1999). Stories are used to organize, predict, and understand the complexities of our lived experiences.įamily stories go beyond the lived experience of each individual member. However, to be human is not simply to keep a record of the details of that sensory experience, but rather it is to organize those experiences into a cohesive story that allows us to integrate selected moments into our sense of who we are. With each year of our lives, we add well over half a million minutes to our banks of experience. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story ( O'Brien, 1998, p. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Finally, we provide a review of the skills and knowledge that the therapist brings to the therapeutic encounter to guide narration and healing.Īnd sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. In trying to understand what a therapist would need to know to help families use their storytelling abilities to talk about and cope with traumas, we believe it is important for them to know the functions of family storytelling, the skills used by family members in the act of storytelling, and the effects of trauma on family storytelling. We reserve the term, narrative, to imply a therapeutic family discussion facilitated by a therapist. We refer to storytelling or storying as the natural process that families engage in to relate experiences to one another. We take this time to explore the multiple aspects of family storytelling that are integral to using narrative techniques with families who have been traumatized. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories (Brian Morton, Starting out in the Evening, as cited in Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found, p. The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories.

Telling my story with his words