Healing Through Stories

Good Morning -

"I heal trauma through stories."

This was the line I used yesterday to explain to our friend when she asked why I was retelling my partner about the gross experience I had just had that I had shared with her a moment earlier.

That's not super clear - let's explain that better, hmm?

I, my partner, and our friend drove up to Mt. Lemmon yesterday for a picnic and some time in the pines. We packed sandwiches and tarot cards and were looking to have some quiet time in the cooler air (usually 30 degrees cooler than Tucson).

By the time we arrived at the spot, we had been in the car for an hour and I needed to use the restroom. Like most mountain picnic spots, the choice for that was an outhouse. Like most mountain outhouses, this one required mouth breathing and balance enough to suspend over the seat without touching.

I pulled that off, but ended up getting a little on the seat. Not wanting to contribute to the general grossness of the situation for the next person, I grabbed some toilet paper when I was zipped back up, turned and bent to wipe the seat.

That move put my nose directly above the hole, and without thinking (since breathing is generally an unconscious act), I accidentally took in a giant noseful of outhouse concentrate coming straight up from the pit.

Repeated "Oh, God!" gasps and some deep yogic cleansing exhales is how our friend saw me exit the outhouse. My partner had gone in behind me, and thought my reaction was just general outhouse reaction.

I was so traumatized by the experience, though, that I felt compelled to share it - to get it out and build communal response to my pain. Our friend asked if I was okay, and I shared what happened. She offered that the car-sickness she had experienced on the ride up was getting ready to manifest after hearing my experience. I suggested we step away from the building and get some fresher air while we waited for my partner.

Once my partner came out, I wanted to share my experience with her, too. Our friend questioned why I was going to share it again when I had already almost made her vomit, but I explained that I heal trauma through story and wanted to share it with my partner. I did, she said "gross", our friend did her own deep breathing, and we were off to find a table under the trees.

We had a lovely picnic, I did tarot readings for both our friend and my partner, and then they teamed up to do a reading for me. The spot we had is one that my partner and I used to go to a lot when we first became friends, and then again when we became more than friends. There's a little creek, some pines for shade, and lots of green growing up along the bank. It's a special spot for us and we were glad to experience it yesterday with our friend.

After a few hours, the rain that had been coming and going all day in fits and starts looked to be getting a little more organized, a little more serious, so we decided to pack up and head home. As we walked back to the car, our friend brought up again how I had almost made her sick telling and then retelling my experience in the outhouse. Again, I responded with, "I heal trauma through stories."

Later in the evening, I remembered this line and had the sense of those times when something much bigger than you speaks through you - those times when you hear yourself saying something and you can see the clarity all around you and the freezing of action in that moment that the statement makes and it sticks in your head and it almost feels like your future you somehow traveled back, got a hold of the current you, took over your vocal chords and had you utter a statement that sticks in you like a fishhook, pulling you toward your future you who is holding the rod and reeling you forward through time to her.

(Ah, esoteric explanations. Who loves 'em?)

Seriously. It was one of those moments. Maybe you don't have those moments. Maybe you do but you dismiss them.

In the moment, I had a sense of "ahhhh" heard at the highest level of my brain, thankfully noted by that level while the other levels of my brain handled the conversation with my partner and our friend, the walking, the breathing, the carrying of picnic goods, etc.

That highest level responded to the "ahhh" statement with, "This might be the "something" you are looking for that supports your dream lifestyle."

It certainly feels possible enough. I believe in the power of story to heal. I believe in the healing that happens when we take the events we experienced and share them through our lens, coloring in the details with our feelings and perceptions. It's why our friend had to retell the story of how I almost made her vomit by retelling my story.

There's magic that happens through story. It's why communities and cultures and religions have used them since forever. It's why people write memoirs. It's why I have an image of Storyteller pottery as the Virgen background.

It's not rocket-science and it's not radical or cutting edge. It's so universally true and yet sometimes I think we forget about it as a healing tool when the trauma is big. In those times, all sorts of other factors like shame or fear kick in and we hold our stories.

We bundle them up like so much loose thread and stuff them down into the bottom of our emotional junk drawer where we try not to go to get things too often because inevitably when we open it either the drawer gets stuck because it's so full of tangled crap or whatever we are trying to retrieve from it is so wrapped up in other crap that it's more work than it's worth to get it.

I'm thinking now of Spider and the Native American understanding of how Spider taught them to weave and how weaving tells the stories. I'm thinking of Penelope and how she wove during the day and unwove at night so that she could wait for her love and not have to marry someone else. I'm thinking of William's astute observation of the tangled webs we can weave when our stories aren't authentic.

I'm thinking about a lot.

Here's to that. Here's to new thinking. Here's to stories. Here's to healing through them and here's to being pulled into our future by the part of us that is there and knows.