Healing Through Storytelling

This episode returns to the question of how to escape the freeze response so many of us are having to the world's many horrors. We live in stories, but we don't necessarily acknowledge that we do. What happens when we consciously embrace this aspect of our psychology, and seriously ask ourselves: what story are we in? We introduce a still-developing paradigm called Storyfinding: a process of successively iterating new stories out of the same sets of facts. It involves storytelling, but also inhabiting the story one tells. One creates a script of some kind and physically acts it out, assessing one's response, and veers into a different, connected story as many times as necessary. Arnold describes a remarkable transformation experienced in the process of making a movie about Storyfinding. While elements of the process are not yet entirely clear, this experience indicates it may help people understand the stories they have been telling themselves, and decide what story about the future they want to be in.