Have You Already Experienced The Healing Power Of Storytelling?
When you’re wounded, release your story. It feels freeing.
There are a lot of stories in my life that have been my guide to overcoming obstacles, persevering through muddy times, and always looking forward.
This one, however, is special.
And I’m telling it to inform others that it’s possible to overcome deeply distressing life events and create positive changes for yourself.
‘One day you will tell your story of how you’ve overcome what you’re going through now, and it will become part of someone else’s survival guide’ Brené Brown
Six months ago today, I was tested positive for COVID-19.
I was admitted to hospital with a suspected pulmonary embolism.
My husband and my baby were also infected.
That was one of the toughest times in my life. But when I look back on it, I’m happy that I was able to use this distressing life event as a catalyst for positive change and shared my story online.
The urgent need to tell ‘your story’
When I was tested positive for COVID-19, I suddenly had the urgent need to share my feelings, worries, and thoughts with others.
By doing so, I was longing for emotional support in regard to my (healthy) family and closest friends.
I wasn’t prepared that friends and family would start telling ‘their stories’ and cut mine.
Despite my mother and father who really listened to me and helped me in this distressing situation, the strongest reaction came from my husband’s family.
My monster-in-law tried to minimize my situation.
Instead of listening, she started to tell me about the low death figures in our area. Additionally, she cut me short, saying that I was young and fit and wouldn’t die.
When she wanted to continue with her monologue, I interrupted her and said I could not listen to it anymore.
She even refused to go into quarantine or take a test. She felt fine, had no symptoms, and had to work.
As far as she was concerned, we couldn’t have COVID. Later she added that we were using her refusal to get tested as a reason to blame her.
Confronted with the inevitable, people go on the defensive
Blame? No, it really wasn’t about that.
For one thing, it was about being a social citizen and protecting yourself and others.
Then it was about helping the person (in this case your daughter-in-law!) affected to find out where the virus had come from and to reassure herself that she wasn’t infected.
You make yourself vulnerable and others try awkwardly to ‘cheer you up’
Even among close friends, the reactions were different.
One friend inundated me with cases of friends who had suffered from Coronavirus and talked my ear off.
She didn’t even notice that it wasn’t about the others, but about my own personal story; about my worries, the next steps, and how to get through the next few days, about the possibility of me dying.
An older friend, who had been worried about his health since the outbreak of the pandemic, tried to convince me that it wasn’t so bad after all.
After all, he was a risk group, but my heart and lungs were still young. I could cough. My heart would cope.
Another friend asked me how bad it was and if it was ‘extreme bad’ or ‘okay bad’?
But not in my case and I should ‘enjoy’ quarantine and family time with my husband and baby, not forgetting that fresh air is crucial (in quarantine?).
Healthy listeners are scared and want to believe in ‘a happy ending’ for their own sake
The media is full of Coronavirus and inevitably everyone is afraid that it will hit them.
Then it hits an acquaintance or someone in the family, and the conversation is cut short and a solution is found in the sense of a general statement:
‘You are young and fit’
‘You can cough.’
‘Your heart will cope.’
This phenomenon really struck me.
Why did people do this? What should I do with such statements?
They hardly nipped my worries and fears in the bud.
To be honest, I was scared to death because my symptoms had already worsened.
I was having trouble breathing. My lungs burned. I felt miserable.
The natural reaction to illness
I found out that cutting your story is a common experience.
If you’re ill and you’re telling your individual patient story to healthy listeners, they may cut the story short in order to offer a solution they believe to be a happy ending.
They describe, in their own words, what will be happening from their point of view and experience so as to confine the catastrophe.
This is a natural reaction to illness and a way of dealing with their own worry.
Being ill, as well as living through a pandemic, is disruptive.
Getting the news that your daughter(in-law) or close friend has tested COVID-19 positive can create chaos and mean a loss of control.
Once the words had passed my lips, they became reality and life was split into a ‘before and after’ — for me, as well as for friends and family.
Go, tell your story and make sense of your disruptive life event!
When we become a patient, our vulnerability is exposed.
We become part of the so-called ‘medical narrative’.
‘The medical care system (temporarily) removes from us our clothes, home, biography, and even our name — things that protect us and identify us as individuals.
In exchange, we become part of the medical narrative, bending to its routines, rituals, accepted behaviors, and timetables.’ Janet Greenhut
But we are more than that.
We want to make sense of our illness. We are unique human beings with the right to turn our illness into a personal story.
It’s about us, not the others.
Becoming a ‘wounded storyteller’ and sharing your personal story of suffering can help you to regain a new sense of control.
Storytelling and creating a narrative can help to build an inner map and put the world back together.
Opening up and telling you, dear reader, that I was COVID-19-positive, what my personal unique experiences were and what I’ve been through can have a therapeutic effect.
Break out of your isolation and become part of someone else’s survival guide
By telling this story, I want to break the isolation.
In the face of my illness, I’ve changed.
COVID-19 and its impact on me and my little family has become part of my ‘life narrative’.
‘A life narrative is a kind of narrative that each of us writes — whether consciously or unconsciously — to make sense of our lives. But since this narrative is not fixed, we can change it.’ Janet Greenhut
If you saw me now, six months after the positive test result, you might be thinking that I don’t look sick.
But Long COVID is an invisible illness, not only physically, but mentally.
Nevertheless, as Nietzsche noted, that which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
Everything you’ve been through will make you stronger and you can use it to create positive changes for yourself.
Final Thoughts: Be true to yourself and open up
We walk through life, overcoming challenges and hardship. While in the midst of it all, we don’t understand why it’s happening to us.
Once on the other side, we rise stronger, more knowledgeable, and better because of it.
By sharing our stories, we can become a guiding light that helps the next person.
I rely on Medium being so much more than bleeding hearts.
When we can be vulnerable and share our experiences, we connect our human core and provide space for others to show up whole.
Most of us will become chronically ill at some point in our lives and will travel that road too, maybe with a loved one.
My request to you:
- Write about your illness story and share your unique experiences.
- Be true to yourself.
Open up and you will get emotional support.
Maybe not from the people you might expect it from in the first place, who will cut your story off in order to offer a solution because they do not want to accept reality.
But from others, who will listen without interruptions and from whom you will feel heard and understood.
Furthermore, your story can become part of someone else’s survival guide and help them through their crisis.
Through pain, we connect
I’ve learned that we connect through pain. I believe in the power of stories. And I know that each one of you is a natural storyteller and we bleed stories.
Finally, it’s important to remember that how we respond to illness stories has an effect on the people telling those stories.
So my final suggestion is this:
Practice storytelling.
Let me end with my initial words by Brené Brown:
‘One day you will tell your story of how you’ve overcome what you’re going through now, and it will become part of someone else’s survival guide’
If you’re struggling to survive something right now, don’t give up.
I’m sending you love, good vibes and prayers!
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