How Telling Our Truths Can Set Us Free by Judith Fertig
THE HEALING POWER OF STORY
A
fter his deployment in Iraq, U.S. Marine Captain Tyler Boudreau returned home in 2004 with
post-traumatic stress syndrome and an emotional war wound that experts now call a “moral injury.” He could only sleep for an hour or two at night. He refused to take showers or leave the house for long periods of time. He and his wife divorced. “My body was home, but my head was still there [in Iraq],” he recounts. At fi rst, Boudreau tried to make sense of his confl icted feelings by writing fi ction. Then he wrote a detailed, nonfi ction analysis of his deployment, but that didn’t help, either. In 2009 he wrote a memoir, Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine, that came closer to conveying his personal truth. “I needed to get back into the story,” he says, so he could pull his life back together in Northampton, Massachusetts. Like Boudreau, we all have stories— ongoing and ever-changing—that we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. They can help us heal and powerfully guide us through life, or just as powerfully, hold us back. In 1949, Sarah Lawrence College Professor Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in
which he outlined a master monomyth. It involves leaving everyday life and answering a call to adventure, getting help from others along the way, facing adversity and returning with a gift, or boon, for ourselves and others. It’s a basic pattern of human existence, with endless variations.
Power to Heal the Body How does telling our truth help heal our body? Professor James Pennebaker, Ph.D., Chair of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, is a pioneer in the mind- body benefi ts of story, which he explores in Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. In the late 1980s, while consulting for the Texas prison system, Pennebaker discovered that when suspects lied while taking polygraph tests, their heart rate rose, but when they confessed the truth, they relaxed. “Our cells know the truth,” writes microbiologist Sondra Barrett, Ph.D., who also blogs at SondraBarrett. com, in Secrets of Your Cells, “Our physiology responds to what we’re thinking, including what we don’t want people to know.” When we are afraid to tell a story and keep it in, “Our cells broadcast a signal of danger,”
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she explains. “Molecules of adrenalin, along with stress hormones, connect with receptors on heart, muscle and lung cells—and in the case of long-term sustained stress, immune cells.” We experience increased heart rate, tense muscles, shortness of breath and lower immunity when we’re stressed. She notes, “When we release the stories and feelings that torment us, our cells respond with great relief and once again become havens of safety.” We need to tell our stories even in facing life-threatening illness, and maybe because of it. Dr. Shayna Watson, an oncologist at the Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario, in Canada, encourages physicians to listen to patients. “In the name of effi ciency,” she reports in an article in Canadian Family Physician, “it’s easy to block out patients’ stories and deal only with the ‘facts’, to see the chat, the time and the stories as luxuries for when there is a cancellation. The study of narrative tells us, however, that in these easily neglected moments we might fi nd more than we expect; there can be understanding, relationship building and healing—the elements of our common humanity.” A current problem is but a dot on the entire timeline of a person’s existence. By keeping their larger story in mind, patients can fi nd a wider per- spective, with the strength and resolve to heal, while the physician can see the pa- tient as a person, rather than a diagnosis.
Power to Heal Emotions “Telling your story may be the most powerful medicine on Earth,” says Dr. Lissa Rankin, the author of Mind Over Medicine, who practices integrative medicine in Mill Valley, California. She’s tested the concept fi rsthand. “So many of us are tormented by the insane idea that we’re separate, disconnected beings, suffering all by our little lonesome selves,” she observes. “That’s exactly how I felt when I started blogging, as if I was the only one in the whole wide world who had lost her mojo and longed to get it back. Then I started telling my story— and voilà! Millions of people responded to tell me how they had once lost theirs and since gotten it back.” They did it by telling their stories, witnessed with loving attention by others that care. “Each of us is a constantly- unfolding narrative, a hero in a novel
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