"Are
you sitting comfortably? Then I will begin"....the opening of "Listen
with mother"; the radio programme
that reaches back into my childhood. To be honest I have no recollection of
sitting down to listen to it, but the phrase conjures up such strong associations
I must have listened in; at least now and again. "Tell me a story" is
a phrase from my own children's childhood and it guaranteed cuddles on the sofa
and time suspended. Those are precious memories but also speak of a society
that confines storytelling to childhood. But in truth stories are how we
construct our world at any age; our self- beliefs, our organisations, even our
nations.
How often
we perceive ourselves through those stories; I was the naughty child or the
good one, I was the clever one, the challenging adolescent, the moody one, the
fun one and those definitions stalk us into adulthood. A delicate story is
woven around us and we can find ourselves playing it out for all of lives for
good or ill. But what if that story is of illness, of abuse, or neglect, of
lack of love....do we need to carry those stories too?
In our
recent and powerful masterclass on storytelling by Marie Ennis O'Connor helped
us understand the power of stories in our lives; how we are hot wired to make
sense of our world though story and that is true of all cultures. Our stories
can serve us well of course, they can be positive and life enhancing but they
can also be negative and limit our belief.
But we
are not our stories, we can change them and find a different way to relate to
them. But perhaps first we have to recognise them, to tell them and to have
someone bear witness to them too.
My blog
has been a vehicle for my story over the last few years. It's been a vehicle
for my ups and downs, my bumps in the road and cul-de-sacs too. It's been a
cathartic release, a place to shed tears and happily also share joy. And it's
held the boundary of what I have felt able to share, the gap between me and the
story. It's helped me retain a sense of myself as separate from my illness, the
experience of cancer and allowed me to leave it on these pages and get on with
living.
Storytelling
in health and social care can help us relate to the impact of illness, to know
how experiences impact, to understand how services work in a way that
statistics never could. But the masterclass identified the importance of the
story being acknowledged, being heard. And can we truly say those stories
really change services? Are they
sanitised into neat boxes and only allowed to reinforce our existing stories
after all? The culture of healthcare remains remarkably intact in spite of a
body of knowledge that points to the need to change. So perhaps it's time to
look at the stories we tell ourselves, listen to those who are telling us
clearly about what matters to them and start to weave some different stories,
that speak of a service that listens, that cares, that works with people as
partners in their care, that puts health and wellbeing at the core of its
focus.
We can
learn to deeply listen to the stories we are told and that we tell ourselves
and, importantly, we can change those stories for ourselves, for our
organisation and for our culture as a nation even. Brene Brown describes
stories as data with a soul, what could be more important than that?
