Storytelling For Empathy

Living Happ(ier)

When I was a little kid, I told my family about the ghost I saw walk across the lawn.

“She was wearing a dress and her hair was in two rows beside her head,” I told them.

My parents had been arguing. My dad looked outside and checked for footprints. There were none.

“Where did she go?” he asked.

“Over the septic tank hole and she disappeared,” I told them.

My father checked. My sibling said I was telling stories and looking for attention, but my mother looked me in the eye and believed me. She made me describe the lady, who, it turned out, ended looking just like the grandmother I didn’t know I had from the biological father that I didn’t know I had either.

She told me later stories of the ghosts she had seen. She told me to hold onto my stories because they are important.

“People will try to make you doubt yourself. You don’t listen to them, baby. You believe in you,” she told me. She told me that a lot.

My mum was one of the best people in the world, but she was a storyteller in a different way. She told herself stories so that she could survive the fact that I wasn’t actually my dad’s—biologically. She told herself stories so she was a protagonist.

My little kid sighting of that ghost cemented me as the storyteller of my family. For some people in my family that was a great thing. For others? Not so much. Even when I explained how DNA worked and that my siblings shared different fathers than I did, my story wasn’t believed by one despite the facts behind it.

I get that.

We all tell our stories to be happy. We have ways of believing how the world works and when that’s disrupted? It isn’t easy to deal with sometimes.

My family is so convoluted that I think of myself as having four sets of grandparents instead of two. That’s because the story of who I biologically am changed so many times. I am a Barnard-Faltin, a Gonçalves-Palreiro-Freitas, a Billodeau-Klardie, a Morse-Philbrick. At one point, I was pretty sure (via my mom’s hints) that I was the daughter of a famous playwright. I was wrong.

My understanding of story and how it relates to self and reality changes a lot because my own origin changed a lot until a DNA test and an email from Canada while I was on book tour started to set me straight. Finally.

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Professor Anita Gonzalez is the interim chair of the Department of Dance and head of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan's School for Music, Theater, and Dance and she teaches a course about the power of storytelling.

And she speaks to the power of story.

“Stories communicate.

They display certain perspectives and they tell their audiences what their creator believes or thinks about a subject, a topic, or an idea.

Sometimes, when people try to express an opinion about something they believe deeply, they argue about who's right or wrong, or what others should or shouldn't do.

But an argument usually doesn't go very far, because people polarize, standing up for beliefs without really listening to anyone else. A story can be much more effective than an argument, because a story can draw you in, make you feel how a character might feel, and if someone's listening to your story, feeling your story, they might just change their minds about a topic or an issue.

So is a story a lie?

When I was a little girl, and my mom accused me of telling a story, she meant I was lying.

A story is not a lie.

It's a way of crafting a description of an incident to communicate a particular perspective.”

We see this in news all the time. The bias of what we report, how we report it, the facts and quotes that make their way into the page or the video. But it happens in life too—we tell stories to survive, to understand, to get people to understand us. The stories show who we are and what we believe. Our hearts and moral compasses, what we place import on? It’s all right there in the words that we put down.

How cool is that? How powerful?

When I report on a meeting or an event for The Bar Harbor Story or when I did in the past for print papers, I enter it as an observer, a journalist, but also as me, Carrie Jones.

When I cover a town council meeting, my story of it is different that the chair, the person who wants a lobster pound not to play music outside, the musician, the owner of the lobster pound or the town councilor who has to vote on it.

Each person sees the same event in a radically different or slightly different way as facts are present, worries are spoken of, needs are explained.

Gonzalez writes,

“So how can story telling from different perspectives lead to social change?

One thing I've noticed is that the people have very different ideas about what is good and bad, about what constitutes social change, or about how to improve society.

Individuals tend to stick to their beliefs or ideologies.

They're deeply ingrained and difficult to change, yet belief systems can and do change when new perspectives or opinions are introduced.

Storytelling can be a major stepping stone towards changing beliefs systems, because it allows for non combative communication, which may also be engaging.

Storytelling can make an audience laugh, or cry, or become fearful, but when a good story is told, people will listen while being introduced to new perspectives or opinions.”

What does this mean for us as people who read and people who write or merely just people. We define ourselves through stories, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we believe.

Or as Gonzalez says much more eloquently,

“In a world that constantly argues for the sake of entertainment and politics, stories highlight intersections of the human experience, instead of digging into our differences.

One important part of storytelling is the idea of empathy.

Empathy is experiencing the feelings, thoughts, attitudes of another person in a way that affects you emotionally and intellectually.

The way you tell a story can create empathy.

So one aspect of this course will be learning about how to structure your story and character to create empathy.

Change happens one person at a time, and change happens when we listen to andempathize with another person's experience.”

When I was little and saw that grandmother ghost out my window, I learned that my story will solicit different feelings. Some will just believe and tell me a story of theirs that links to mine. Some will relate. Some will call me schmaltzy or a liar. Some will understand and some will trying to dissect it so that they can find bits of truth, too.

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