What is your once upon a time story?
Healing trauma through storytelling
One tool we can use in trauma healing is to write our story as if it was a fairy tale. You begin with when you were born and write it in the third person, such as ‘Once upon a time, there was a little (boy/girl/person) and they …
When I have used this technique with people sometimes it has been an incredibly rich experience; to validate their story through the lens of the third person can be felt on a visceral level and shift shame into self-compassion.
For others, it can cause them to freeze in fear.
That doesn’t mean we shut the book.
Quite the opposite.
Whatever the reaction, we can witness that, stay with it, honour it and curiously play around the edges.
We give it permission to exist.
Maybe their story needs to start with ‘Once upon a time, this little person had such a terrible tale to tell that it was locked in a padlocked book, in a padlocked chest, in a padlocked room…’ and so on.
Even writing that can help us to witness our once upon a time.
Why is witnessing our once upon a time story important?
For some, it can feel to terrifying to tell, and works quite well lockeduplockeduplockedup, thank you very much.
Except… our once upon a times have a habit of squeaking out in our behaviour; behaviours that can cause us harm.
So our once upon a times block us from our happy ever afters.
It is important to honour our once upon a time and there are oh so many ways to do it.
Telling our story of how we have been hurt, betrayed, lost, helps to bring us out of isolation because it reduces toxic shame, which fosters silence and isolation.
Toxic shame is a result of repeated rejection, scorn or empathic failure, which can mean that the last thing we want to do is share how we are feeling or what we need. (Mollon 2002).
There is something about putting your story at arms length - like through writing it as a fairy tale or in a poem - that feels less exposing and vulnerable and therefore less likely to trigger toxic shame.
Did someone say poem? Oh, go on then.
Just like in the poem, our ‘happy ever after’ can feel a fraud if we are rooted in our once upon a time because we adapt our sense of self has been distorted due to what we have experienced.
When we uproot our once upon a time, when we explore it and pull apart its fibrous hold, we can start to drop some of it - the familial, social and cultural influences that don’t serve us... and come to our 'I'; the essence of us.
When someone is aligned with their authentic sense of self they can be responsive to the environment, not adaptive.
Adaptive requires you to modify yourself for the conditions around you, responsive requires you to consider your self - your values, your limits, your needs, and then act accordingly.
Does this mean that we drop the idea of being saved by a knight in shining armour or being the knight in shining armour?
Yes!
We can explore how our needs were not met, and how we want to meet them now as an adult.
We can understand ways in which shame took hold and make up our own support network to share that shame until it can be dissolved and soothed by compassion of others and self-compassion.
We start to learn that our happy ever after isn’t a line in the sand, but a decision each day to live in the present, to surrender our sorrow, to battle our dragons of not enough-ness and don’t matter and meet our fear with faith in change.
And then wake up the next day to create a new happy ever after… one day at a time.
This poem is my story, and it’s the story I am encouraging others to take as their own in my Feeling Freedom programme.
The doors are now OPEN for the next cohort of this programme, if you would like first dibs at joining us (spaces are limited), hit 'happy ever after' and let me know so that we can organise a chat. I would so love to accompany you on your quest!
That's it for now,
'Til next time!
Jacky ✨