Storytelling and Mental Health.

How can the ability to narrate collaborate in the state of the mental and emotional health of people? What is it used for in the context of a therapy or art therapy workshop? Why is it considered a valuable tool for self-knowledge?

These are all questions that will make it possible to unfold the association that exists between narration and health and will enable it a little more as a tool for elaboration and change.

Narrating allows us to elaborate on our story. It is to symbolize, metabolize, process that which sometimes seems to find no word. Transform a feeling, an image, into the story, perhaps, of a character. A character who runs in a plot with others, who generates a bond, who faces conflicts and then sees himself or not in the dilemma of resolving them.

The narrative brings us back to life. With the links, with the places, we travel. It puts us face to face, but mediatized, with mandates, with ideas, our own and those of others, allowing us to find a voice, a subjective position and deconstruct the roles we assume on a daily basis.

Narrating is weaving. It is to build a warp that protects us, that sustains us in the face of emptiness, in the face of what is sometimes too real. It allows us to locate for a moment in another place what happens to us, or what happened to us, or something with which we identify ourselves at some point. That putting outside, that expression allows us to observe ourselves from another position, to reflect on our position in the world.

Narrating we understand that what we perceive is a part of reality, but that there are many others. Through the characters we can be on the opposite sidewalk, putting ourselves in that "other place" and thus opening our perspective regarding ourselves and others.

It is a therapeutic resource because through it symbolizations take place, elaborations that are otherwise difficult. The adolescent and the adult sometimes suddenly abandon many of the playful and symbolic resources deployed in childhood.

The adult plays other games, as Eric Berne would say. Games that are set in social interactions, but often do not allow for creative storytelling.

This loss of symbolic approach accompanied by the lack of symbols in our culture generates serious difficulties in being able to metabolize what happens to us: the changes of the stage, the transitions, the acceptance of a loss, the risk of the new, the recognition of our potentialities. , tolerance to frustrations and the motivation to continue, among others. In all these instances, the narration accompanies, generates support, and allows us to make visible what is hidden and what can offer us the necessary information to be able to take the next step.

If we live through a traumatic episode, for example, narrating it, both orally and in writing, is a way of dealing with it. To symbolize it and allow us that its impact is less harsh and that its consequences in the unconscious have less scope. If there is a greater distance between the subject and the story, it is even more interesting because you can play with what happened. Transform that fact into something that happens to someone else, and the story, in this instance, takes on another dimension with the possibility of developing in a totally different way.

Narrating gives us the possibility of elaborating and building something else with what we bring, what we experience, what was transmitted to us, or what happened to us. It is to choose and take a position.

 

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