The second way we are called to draw on emotional courage in storytelling is in the double step act of facing our experiences, again, all the emotions we need to process so we can then share them, making sense of them so we can bring an audience to a place of peace, hope or resolution around them. This is huge. This is the work of a lifetime.
Not all stories are difficult or painful, but if you want to be a storyteller you will inevitably bump up against these memories, and you can either shy away, or step by step work inwards.
Such story work enables us to process experiences we have tucked away in the lock safe of our minds, so that we can name and own them, and make new meaning from them, understand their role and impact in our lives, and so we can then do the emotional heavy lifting for our audience.
This takes courage. It takes the ability to sit with the discomfort of reliving emotions we didn’t enjoy at the time and don’t enjoy any more now, but we know they impact us, even as we ignore them. To story these memories we need tools and/or support that we didn’t have at the time. We also need to be discerning, knowing when the time is right and whether we are ready to share, and at some level we need to know that the only way is through.
We need a level of self compassion to hold ourselves with love through this, because despite what we think, the passage of time does not heal all wounds, it simply papers over them. If we tucked things away in a box, when we re-open the box they are the same as when we put them away; without working through them they continue to be unresolved and they continue to impact us in ways we often can’t see or understand.
We need to tell our stories from our scars not our wounds, but some scars are deceptive, and once we go back and remember what happened, the wound is re-opened and we are as emotionally challenged now as we were at the time, because at the time we did not process the experiences, we numbed or distracted away from them, in the millions of ways available to humans to numb or distract, and so when we are called to face and process these emotions, it can get messy and distressing and difficult.
But the way to freedom and acceptance is through the emotions, not shutting the box and sitting on it. We cannot story the experience that way and nor can we grow; to keep the box shut simply means we push the impact of the emotions to find other ways to be released, and we are captives of these experiences with little or no control over them.
It may be that we need to set the story aside and do some personal work to process the emotions and the experience. Sometimes this may require us to seek professional help, from a counsellor or therapist in order to come to some understanding and settlement of the experience, or it may mean we draw on any number of practices and self help tools that can allow us to process experiences, or it may be that the very act of crafting the story enables the processing to occur, and the more you practice and share, the more you can lean on the story process to settle into the experiences and emotions, and you can share them from a place of healing.
Brene Brown has a saying that is apt for the storytelling process, ‘choose courage over comfort’ – she uses it as a daily prayer/mantra, and it is a great one for a storyteller because to explore and then reveal our difficult experiences takes us to choose courage over comfort, but the rewards are phenomenal. And the more we do it, the easier it gets, and less uncomfortable.
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