Let’s Start at the Beginning: How the Stories We Tell Shape Trauma, Meaning, and What Comes Next
By Carlos Martinez- Guest Contributor
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are some of the deepest magic we create.
You may wonder at me calling them magic, but these stories we tell ourselves about ourselves transcend time, space, and place. They are sometimes impervious to attack (whether the attacks are well-meaning or meant for our destruction). They persist through influence; they hold on for dear life when we are dead set on believing things like how bad I am or how unforgivable I am. Saying, “I am a monster” in response to something I’ve done (which is human and understandable) is a powerful story.
This is something I will say often to clients I work with. When a client accuses me of not caring about the work they did or not caring about their outcome, I don’t try to convince the person that I do care or that I want them to flourish. I could tell them all day long that I do care (and sometimes I’ve tried). What I’ve learned is that any story that is entrenched will be largely impervious to change. What I have started to say instead, in response to someone’s statement to me about what they believe, is, “That’s a powerful story.”
In this response, my role is not to dismantle the story or create a new one for the client. It is to help them evaluate whether or not the story is true, helpful, or meaningful. Does the story fit the situation? How married are they to the story? Is the story a recreation of other stories involving other people who were characters in their life before coming to meet and work with me? Do I remind them of that person?
If the client is open to being curious, we can do some work on exploring their story. This is part of the wonder of narrative therapy. Let’s talk about narrative therapy specifically related to trauma work and how changing our stories can change our trajectories.
Narrative therapy is central to the idea of changing our stories. Literally, as we tell our stories, something shifts. The voice of the narrator can move from me being my harshest critic to someone who can tell a story with understanding and self-compassion. I like to think about three aspects of narrative therapy that show up as we tell our stories: adherence, incoherence, and coherence. All three words share a common Latin root: haerere, meaning to stick. Each prefix of the word changes the meaning significantly (of course), and each one relates to an aspect of narrative therapy.
The goal of narrative therapy’s trauma work is to tell our stories with coherence so that the story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If we can tell our stories with the voice of a compassionate narrator in a way that contains our stories, we can move toward a concept called post-traumatic growth.
Adherence
To adhere means that something sticks to something else. It means attachment to something external—not just objects, but ideas and rules. So tape adheres to a wall, employees must adhere to certain dress codes, and family members must adhere to spoken (and sometimes unspoken) rules.
Those laws are immutable: “Children should be seen and not heard”; “You must obey (because I said so)”; and “It’s your job to make sure I’m okay.”
These rules we are supposed to adhere to sometimes outlast our initial family structure for decades. Our parents could have passed on or have been out of our lives for years, and we sometimes will still adhere to our family roles and rules as if we were going to get in trouble immediately for breaking them. Many of the people I have worked with come in with these family rules they will tell themselves they need to adhere to, even with no other family members in sight.
When I went through a program at Onsite Workshops called the Living Centered Program as a participant, I was invited to do something called a family of origin sculpture, where I would create a sort of living snapshot with fellow group participants standing in for various family members. It’s an experiential exercise where we might ask someone to stand in for our family (for me, it was my sisters, mother, and father).
The way the schedule fell, I was slated to do my piece of work after lunch. I remember going through the lunch line, getting a plate of food (meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and peas), taking two bites, and feeling so sick that I had to step away from the table and walk away. I got a migraine that made me feel sick enough to want to throw up. I went to lie down, and after about an hour of trying to rest, I realized it wasn’t going to work and gave up.
Even after trying to make myself get sick, I knew the only thing that would help would be for me to actually go through with the exercise. Everything in me was screaming that I needed to adhere to one of the strongest rules in my family, which was, “We don’t air our dirty laundry to people outside the family.”
My body was actively trying to punish me for trying to break that rule, but I determined at the end of the lunch break that I hadn’t traveled hundreds of miles (and paid thousands of dollars) just to go lie down and not do the work that would help set me free.
I went back to the group after the break, asked for some Tylenol, and proceeded to lay out my whole family system: what it looked like (or at least, my version of it), what it felt like to grow up in it, and finished with a promise to the younger part of myself in the sculpture that I was committed to coming to get him.
After I finished the sculpt, my headache vanished. No more adherence.
Incoherence
When someone comes into therapy to do trauma work, the trauma therapist has to take steps to make sure the client is stabilized and has enough resources to start unpacking their history. With time, patience, safety, and connection to helpful resources (like a supportive friend group, spirituality, good sleep, and meaningful rest), the client is able to start making sense of their story.
Many times, a client was raised in a household where the actions that caregivers took just made no sense. Explanations for abusive, berating behaviors made no sense. Children who grew up in these households were told to cope, lie about it to outsiders, or were told that everything happening under their roofs was completely normal.
The problem is that when the client starts going out into the world of relationships, jobs, and education, they see that what they grew up in was about as far from normal as possible. The client sees that the stories that were ironclad when they were supposed to adhere to them turn into chains made out of tissue paper.
What is common in the work is to see a client who starts trying to make sense of their story and finds themselves lost in the time stream of ideas. One of the tools we use in narrative therapy is a timeline, essentially a record of the traumas that the client has lived through and endured. When a client starts losing time (narrating things out of order, skipping over the timeline in a haphazard way), the therapist knows the client has entered into incoherence, where nothing sticks together.
When someone’s own history is incoherent, it becomes difficult to make meaning out of their stories. Life feels haphazard—and hazardous.
This applies not just to time, but to meaning as well. When someone tells their story and responds in a way that does not make sense, the therapist does well to pause the story and be curious about what’s happening in the here and now.
One time, after sharing with a friend about something I had endured when I was growing up, I laughed and said, “Isn’t that crazy?” I mean, it was crazy; just not the funny ha-ha kind of crazy.
When my friend didn’t laugh the way I expected her to and said instead, “Carlos, that’s abuse,” it made me look at what I had gone through and see it in a more coherent manner.
It also made me think, “If I had a client who was sharing this thing I just shared and they started to laugh, I would never join them in that. I would be aghast.” It took the reflection of the mirror my friend held up to me to realize that nobody should have experienced what I had experienced and that laughter was not a coherent response.
By being curious about that moment, my friend and I were able to suss out what was behind the laughter and connect in a grounded way to how I had actually felt about being in that situation.
Incoherence, in this case, makes total sense, ironically. To make sure we don’t get overwhelmed, the mind will take care of itself and the body, of course, by moving time around to space things out into more manageable bits. This is why sometimes, when someone is deep in the throes of grief, the person will still refer to the lost loved one in the present tense, as in, “He says this,” or “She loves those things,” about a loved one who has passed on.
In narrative therapy, the work focuses on trying to get the person to examine the rules they had to adhere to and to cobble together an understanding of what happened to them (or what they did to themselves), through incoherence, to coherence.
Coherence
Trauma work that begins the healing process involves telling our stories in a way that has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. When I run trauma groups and participants share their stories, I encourage them to draw out their timelines and then share their stories in a way that gives the stories this beginning, middle, and ending.
The beginning is where the client starts: the trauma has an inception. Many times, in telling their stories, clients are able to recognize that the trauma that started in them actually started in the generation that came before them and, many times, in the generation(s) before that.
Like the 1,000-mile journey that begins with a single step, the beginning of the trauma story is where the client breaks free from the rules other people laid on them and starts using their own voice to break those rules.
It is the telling—to other people—about what happened that starts to rewrite our stories.
For many, the act (I was tempted to call it a simple act, but it is far from that) of telling that story of abuse or neglect will accomplish at least two things. It will dredge up the feelings we felt when the initial wound happened (which is why many people avoid this work). The pain from this can feel insurmountable.
But the act of telling accomplishes something else: the story has eyewitnesses, and those eyewitnesses will respond with everything we never got when we went through it the first time.
This hearing and holding provides something foundational to trauma work: containment.
In many of our homes growing up, there was no containment. For many of us, there was no adult in the room, or the adult who was there was absent (physically or emotionally). Whatever feelings we might have had, we knew that there wasn’t going to be someone there to help us contain the experience, no one to teach us how to self-soothe, no one to tell us it was going to be okay. Or we had to provide the emotional container for a caregiver.
Conversely, when we tell our stories (the act of using our voice) to a therapist or a group who will meet us with belief and empathy, when we say what we were never supposed to say, we begin to build coherence. That coherence acts as a sticking together into a unified whole, something that can be logical and stand up to scrutiny.
Rather than being told this should stick, our stories coalesce and make sense from the inside out.
“I feel like I’m damaged goods” (which may have been the initial story) can change, then, into, “Anyone who grew up in that house would feel like they were damaged goods. My reaction makes sense.”
And once they’re able to make this coherent connection, the client can move into the last bit of narrative therapy: writing a new story. And this is the end result of the narrative therapy focus, when we tell our stories with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Telling a story this way creates containment around my story and lets me evaluate it from the inside out.
Instead of being the person who is deeply in it, lost in time and thrown about by the waves of the trauma, the goal is to move toward a superseding Self who can tell the story of what happened, but who sees that chapter as having an ending. It is contained: a part of me but not the whole of me, and I can see that my suffering is just another part of who I am.
And I get to start writing a new story that can access the magic of the resilient survivor I am.
I am more than my mistakes and traumas.
I get to be the protagonist of a powerful new story.
About the Author
Guest contributor Carlos Martinez, LPC, CSAT, explores how the stories we tell about ourselves can shape how we understand our past, our relationships, and who we believe ourselves to be. Through the lens of narrative therapy, he considers what can happen when we begin examining those stories—and discover that we may have the power to tell them differently.
