The Wounded Storyteller

 The Wounded Storyteller

I am reading a wonderful book by Arthur W. Frank with the title noted above. The second edition was released just last year, and I highly recommend it to anyone who feels that they fit into the description.

Its profound value to me has been in eloquently articulating the drive behind my writing INTEGRAL HEALING, which is part memoir/biography and part self-empowering guide to constructing one's own Integral Healing Practice. There is a fair amount of resistance to writing memoirs and biographies.  They are often considered self-aggrandizing vanity projects. Either the author feels that his life merits more attention than others, or his is worse than others for some unique reason. This may be true in part and for certain authors, but we are finding that such memoirs/autobiographies bring forth extraordinary healing potentials.

As I've previously noted, more and more hospitals are sponsoring writing programs for their past and present patients. It is not merely the idea of catharsis of writing about one's bout with illness. Any act of writing presupposes a reader, and others need to read these stories as well. The gift flows in two directions.

Frank defines the wounded storyteller as anyone who has suffered and lived to tell the tale.

But telling is joined to listening, and those who listen have the potential of forming a community so that none may feel alone.

                                          

This blog and the fall publication of my book are the two trumpet calls that I hope have the power to create community. They signal my desire "to widen the circle, to amplify and connect the voices that were telling tales about illness, so that all of us could feel less alone". (Frank, xi)  My desire and intention is to provide a guide, a companion, and a truth teller to the journey through illness. 

I was born in 1945; my father newly arrived back home after being injured in the Pacific Front of World War II. I am the first of the huge demographic wave of Baby Boomers, and we are soon heading into our 70's. We have been renamed the Silver Tsunami, and our concerns about health care, rejuvenation techniques, and hearing about others who have succumbed to their illnesses will only focus more of our attention and funds. My husband, born in 1938, is receiving daily calls about friends' passing. He has become one of those people who scans the obituary section after perusing the sports scores. We spend more and more time visiting  hospitals and paying our respects at funeral homes. 

All of us at some time or another will become wounded storytellers. There is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, I see it as paying homage to times of  significant transition. 

I am winding up my seminar that will result in my becoming a clinically-trained integral minister. I have submitted many case studies of those I am working with during their transitions. Some involved death struggles; others, the grief over more predictable life transitions. Being fully present to another's telling of the story about his transition is one of the most important things that a chaplain can do for another fragile human. It certainly differs from my two other careers, that of teacher and lawyer.

During my long tenure as both teacher and lawyer, I discovered two human truths in tension, which we know from the Integral framework is a both/and situation:

  1.   No matter how many "drugs in a car" cases I represented, each one was singularly differentiated from the others. No matter how many bright females I had in class, each one was bright in a dazzlingly individual manner. Thus it is with suffering through illness. Every one of us getting chemo suffered through the treatment, but in unique ways. The drug I got during one infusion put me to sleep for 19 hours. No one else had ever responded to that drug in that manner. But my unique bodily constitution did.

   2.  Yet every one of the cases I handled, students I taught, or as I went through cancer and its treatments, depended upon a cultural context. The conduct of my defendants, hopes of my students, and choice of treatments had an invisible boundary selected for them by their cultures. I could consolidate my clients, students, and patients into categories with similarities depending on their backgrounds.

My story is unique, AND it can be grouped in with others of  a similar culture. I am interested in those who have used some part of the Integral framework to cover both of these aspects: Their unique stories, and how the use of an Integral framework worked for them.

But I do not wish to limit my mission to just those who are already using an Integral perspective. I want to form as large a circle of wounded together to support one another through their personal narratives so that we may all benefit from them.