What We're Reading Now
Telling Your Story Can Help You Heal
30 December 2014
Allison watched Donald Davis’ TEDxCharlottesville Talk, How the Story Transforms the Teller, and was grateful for his advice that telling your story can help you “crawl out from under” your heartbreak so that you can heal.
Tags: allison read, allison watched, balance, courage, grief, happiness, ted
Earlier this month I wrote two blog posts about how to help yourself cope with grief by writing. Several clients and friends decided to try Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries’ experiment with me as they struggled to get over some lingering pain. All of us felt that the exercise helped us take a next step toward healing. None of us quite understand how it worked, but all agree that it’s worth trying since we feel better than we did before.
As I was writing those posts, I knew that soon I’d be suggesting yet another way to help yourself heal after a loss. Last month, I blogged in anticipation of our second annual TEDxCharlottesville on 14 November 2014. I knew I was excited about many of the speakers based on their bios and they delivered wonderful messages. (You can watch 16 of the Talks here and the remaining eight should be released in the next few weeks.) However, I was truly delighted by what Donald Davis had to say in his Talk, How the Story Transforms the Teller.
You’ll see in Davis’ bio that he comes from a family of appalachia storytellers and that he, "…discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream, go anywhere I pleased, fight any foe, live or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place.”
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a professional storyteller with a North Carolina accent spoke to me. We love a good story in my southern family. In fact, my daddy will start a story about something that happened last week with, “Once upon a time…” because he adores a good fairy tale and likes how that opening gets his listener ready. We just celebrated Christmas and every gift has its own story so when you’re unwrapping presents with us you have to settle in with patient ears to hear.
I hope you’ll treat yourself to Donald Davis’ TEDxCharlottesville Talk. He tells a story of great tragedy and ultimate triumph. He’ll make you laugh. But more importantly, he’ll show you why telling your story of heartbreak to different people, in different ways, and from different points of view can help you get out from under a story that’s holding you down like a rock. “The story doesn’t change what happened, but the story has the remarkable power to completely change our whole relationship to happening.”
I’m not sure if telling your story in this way will help with the very worst of your losses, but I think after enough time passes that it might. And everyone I know who is suffering from any kind of loss wants to find a way to feel better so I’m hopeful that Donald Davis’ story might be as helpful to you as it was to me.
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