I’m delighted to publish a new essay, “The Single Most Powerful Tool for Healing: Tell the Right Stories,” on Tiny Buddha.
As the title of the essay suggests, the essay is about the experience of healing from trauma and the importance of having good narratives for this work.
It felt vulnerable to write this essay—and that vulnerability is what the piece itself is largely about. So often, we’re quiet about our challenges, cloaked in shame about the things that hurt us. I want to help shift that practice so that we can receive more support when we’re hurting and so that we can heal more fully by giving ourselves appropriate narratives about the value and beauty of healing itself.
As I write: “And just as our trauma stories are powerful, our healing stories are equally powerful and important. We can and must break the silence and taboo not only around the trauma itself, but also around the complicated, messy, long, but ultimately rewarding process of healing from trauma.”
You can read the essay here:
The Single Most Powerful Tool for Healing: Tell the Right Stories
I hope you’ll read it and enjoy it! I’ve also created some questions for reflection for your own life below. I hope you’ll enjoy those questions as well and find reflecting and writing on them helpful.
Journal Questions to Reflect on Your Own
Narratives of Healing
- Was there a time in your life that you experienced a breakdown? Can you reframe that breakdown in terms of a breakthrough?
- How do you react when you feel challenged? What is the story that you tell yourself about it? Think of a specific time in the past month and write about it. Could you frame that story differently?
- What were the stories you were told as a child about illness and suffering?
- What happened when you were a child when you were sick? Tell one story about a response that you received to your sickness that was challenging for you and one story about a response that you received that was supportive and healing for you
- Imagine your ideal healing scenario: who would be there? What would happen? Would you be pampered? What would it look like? Where would it be?
- Tell a story about your own healing in which you are a hero
- Tell a story about another person’s healing in which that person is heroic.