On Healing and Story
There are many levels of healing when we tell our stories. We externalize that which we hold in. What we hear ourselves say and what another hears us say validates our story. We speak ourselves into being. Sometimes we don’t know our story until a person listens to it. It doesn’t make sense or we don’t remember the whole story until we’re prompted to tell it. The act of giving it linguistic narrative creates meaning. Some people, like doctors and therapists, when they listen to our story, help us find the mysterious illness ailing our bodies or the psychic trauma we have buried in the corners of our minds. There is another side to healing with story, too, and that is by being told a story.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras explains this in her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds. Her mother (Mami), a Colombian curanderas, or healer, explains to Ingrid, “The biggest thing I have learned all these years…is that nobody wants the truth, but everyone wants a story” (p. 165, italics in original and all additional quotes in italics by Mami). Mami reads palms and tarot, she speaks to ghosts, she whispers over water, she works with herbs to heal. “Good divination is the art of a good story,” she says to Ingrid. “You have to speak in metaphors, in paradox, in symbolism, she said. You have to tell a story that will allow the client to experience the truth without your ever having to name it.” Mami learned she cannot give flat-out truth, but has to create rituals for her clients to enact their healing, to begin their new story.
She gives an example to Ingrid of a woman who wished for her father to forgive her. Mami knew the woman must first forgive her father, but she couldn’t simply tell her that. That’s too simple, too obvious. And I think, perhaps, doesn’t contain a remedy. Instead of Mami instructing the woman to take some pills to be better, or tell her flat out that she must forgive her father first, she gives the woman a new story. She creates a ritual for the woman to enact, involving a plant that Mami knew the woman’s father had “pinched…in anger,” so the plant must be “cleansed and released into the wild” before the father would change his thinking (166). The two women went to a river and when they performed the act, Mami only then “instructed the woman to forgive her father. The plant was a metaphor, but the woman would never know.” Through the woman’s enactment of a new story, Mami says the woman forgave him. And soon her father forgave her too. The way to healing is “finding the right words”(175). Sometimes we have to speak them to know they are right. But when you are a healer, the right words must be chosen with care.
I am not a doctor. I’m not in the health care field at all. I studied narrative medicine for my MFA and I enjoy working with plants as a way of healing: to ingest, as poultices, and to spend time with; and I use words to heal. Other than the wounded animals I have cared for, I’ve never had to communicate with someone who is a patient, never had to instruct someone to do this or take that to heal. But it makes sense to me that to heal from psychic pain we need more than abstract truths. We need those abstract truths somehow related to our bodily existence. For that is how we relate to and move through the world: with our bodies. A ritual with story gives us something to do to bring about healing.
Both psychic pain and physical pain live in the body. Although animals can’t tell us with spoken language where they hurt or what happened that they have a huge gash in their right foreleg, we can still read their bodies to understand them. We can read them like a hunter reads tracks on the ground. Tracks and wounds speak and when we attend to them and narrate them we give them more meaning that creates contextual sense.
What happens when we don’t live by story? Ingrid describes in The Man Who Could Move Clouds how her sister Ximena struggled with anorexia. Ximena was institutionalized to recover, but nothing the doctors in Chicago did could help her. Ximena refused her mother’s treatments of blessed water. Mami saw Ximena was trapped in a circle of illness. “To get rid of a circle, you externalize it…You tell a story.” (229) At some point after Ximena had been released from the institution and was following a regimented diet, she declared she wanted to have a child. Ingrid privately expressed concern to Mami, saying she may begin to starve herself again once her belly grows big with a child. Mami said this is foolish. This was Ximena’s new story, her way out of her circle of illness.
Ghosts from a traumatic event get trapped in our circles of pain. Or maybe they create the pain. Ghosts circle around an event, creating the circle of repetitive thinking that is difficult to step outside of. But if we deny that ghosts even exist, says Ingrid, then we deny our history. These ghosts linger when we don’t live by story.
“Who denies themselves their own hunger?” (220) Mami asks Ingrid when they try to understand Ximena starving herself. Ingrid explains to Mami that it makes Ximena feel powerful, to be in control. We westerners deny our hunger. We suppress and suppress and suppress. We white people in the US call stories old wives tales—stories belittled, suppressed. We need hard-line facts. We need proof and we need evidence. Stories are soft. Stories are womanly. When we fail to attend to story, we deny our own history. “A country that doesn’t even believe in its own history cannot believe in ghosts.” (222)
I don’t know any of my ancestors the way Ingrid does. It’s as if I were adopted, disconnected from my past. I have no guidance in this nuclear family of whiteness the way Ingrid does. How is being white like being adopted? We have made it this way but we don’t have to be. Alastair Macintosh speaks of white indigineity; it does exist. Once, we were all indigenous. Now, our featureless way of being clings to anything else for story. But instead of honoring it in its rightful place, we steal it and say, This is ours. You can’t have it anymore now that we’ve taken it. And if you try to take it back, we will say you stole it from us.
When we don’t know our past, our history, our ancestors, we struggle to find a new story for ourselves, or maybe not even a new story but any story at all (but we all have them). Using another’s story doesn’t work and is appropriation. Cherry-picking a different culture’s rituals removes those rituals from their rich context.
We westerners are thirsty for spiritual connection. We have suppressed psychic pain from generations of trauma. For years we have hidden from ourselves in cold, stark rooms of reason without allowing in the beauty of dark or mystery—of story. When we start telling our stories and when we begin to listen to others’ stories, we may find we have an infinite amount of space within ourselves for them. We begin to ground ourselves in our reality. We may find by telling our story we narrate ourselves into healing.
Rojas Contreras, Ingrid. The Man Who Could Move Clouds. Doubleday, New York, 2022.
(Photo I took of a statue in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, MD)