Therapeutic Story work
Stories are as old as our ability to speak and listen and are universally loved by children of all ages.
As adults, we often have old and redundant narratives which repeatedly run through our minds and which no longer serve us. As a therapist, I can help you identify these old stories and rewrite them in a way that serves you better now. Sometimes it can be helpful to employ metaphors which directly reach the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is the realm where we hold many of our old stories, often without even realising that we do so. As a Hypnotherapist, I can encourage a client to discover the stories which are limiting them in some way, to acknowledge them and then to deconstruct them so they lose most, if not all, of their power. We all hold beliefs about ourselves which originate in past experiences, often when we were very very young.
I also write bespoke stories for children to address the emotional fears and worries that they may have. These can then be read to the child at bedtime, or can be recorded and played to them. Children absolutely love to have their own special story.
To create a bespoke story for a child, I ask for any worries and concerns that are troubling her or him and also their favourite story characters. Witches, princesses, princes, dragons and wizards feature large, but so also do aliens, specific animals, trains and a host of others. I then create a story using those characters and themes, with an embedded metaphor, or metaphors addressing the issues that are troubling the child. This can then be read to him or her at bedtime.
The same process can work for adults too, but in a different way. Having found the metaphor that we want to embed in their subconscious, I then craft a story around it. The client is taken to a deep, peaceful place where they are totally relaxed and encouraged to imagine they are walking on a beach or somewhere else they find pleasant. Then I start to tell them the story with the embedded metaphor. Just like with the children’s stories, the characters may be animals or princes and princesses. However, in this case, the adult gets bored with the story and stops consciously paying attention. The metaphor then becomes lodged unchallenged in their subconscious mind and begins to do its work; changing the story they have always believed about themselves.
They are both just stories
When we are going through difficulties of one sort or another, it can be easy to slip into a mindset of ‘Things always go wrong for me.’ Past situations readily come to mind which were similar in some way. Before long , we are in victim mode, where we feel essentially powerless to move forward.
It can be helpful to write all of this down as a story and then read it back to yourself, to see if you gain any insights. It can also be a good idea to write the story of the same part of your life, but this time recording all the positive things that happened.
They are both just stories, just versions of events and not absolute truth.