Narrative Therapy Quotes

Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.

Shame derives its power from being unspeakable...If we speak shame, it begins to wither. Just the way exposure to light was deadly for the gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.

Yes, doing a work, telling a story very much represents a way to save my own life, and on so many levels.

But this too is true: stories can save us.

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.

Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.

I can't remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves.

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

Change your story, change your life. Divorce the story of limitation, and marry the story of the truth and everything changes.

Then I tell my own story. The two things that people really need to transform is language to understand their experience and to know they're not alone. It's the combination of the researcher-storyteller part.

To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.

We learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.

One of the ways to reincarnate is to tell your story.

Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.

We all have our own story. And we stay attached to our story. This can stop us from growing and living. You wanna make your life better? Change your story, change your life.

To survive, you must tell stories.

Our stories can set us free. When we set them free.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.

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.

As long as we have our stories there is hope.

All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.