Healing Through Storytelling Quotes

Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women.

...stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills.

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

I'll write this all down for you," I said. "I'll put it in a story." I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

I feel that the power that storytelling has to change people, to bring them together, to have that cathartic sort of experience, is something that definitely has helped my life be worthwhile and better.

A story-a true story-can heal as much as medicine can.

It's important that we share our experiences with other people. Your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else. When you tell your story, you free yourself and give other people permission to acknowledge their own story

I have healed myself through sharing my birth story as well as others' stories in my film 'No Woman, No Cry,' and in various writings and talks about maternal health.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

We repair the rips in memory’s fabric with the filler of fable.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

I'd figure out ways to use role-playing in the healing of people.