We all love stories. We love to love or loathe the people in them. We want to know what happens next. We like to explore our common experiences and our uniqueness.And we want all this to happen in a safe, alternative world – which we can visit or leave when we want.And what we learn can empower us in our own lives.
I run Lonely Furrow Company Out of the Box Storytelling sessions for people in distress and people who care for those in distress – including their legal advisers, their healthcare professionals, their social workers, their family and friends.
A typical Story Session includes opportunities to connect with others through stories, play writing games, listen to stories, discuss stories, rework stories in the light of personal experience, and share learnings. The stories I use come from world-wide sources and historic and current contexts. These sessions help people because of the common human experience they share with others and the problem-solving possibilities of working with Story – while at the same time re-discovering their own creativity. And an essential element of a Story Session – in any form – is the element of play.
Story-gathering is a special aspect of therapeutic writing. For example, creative writing practitioners – for a definition of this role please see Lapidus (www.lapidus.org.uk) – often provide people who have never previously told their own story, with the opportunity. The value of ‘being heard’ and having your words fed back to you as a poem or prose memoir is well-documented. (Please see the reading list among these pages.)
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