It’s hard for me to get used to the loss of stories ; In fact, I refuse to lose the literary beauty of stories and their subtle (and also beautiful) ability to delve into the emotional world and help organize and deal with it.
We are tellers of stories, of stories through which we have been learning and at the same time they have become a route, an encrypted map to overcome both collective and individual fears. Narrative is part of our evolutionary process as social beings that we are ; We want to transmit and leave a mark and teachings for the future, that transcend beyond their time.
As a species, we create our first narratives and stories through representations and symbols. in them We tell each other the stories of our daily lives and above all we highlight the threats, achievements and the extraordinary
The cave paintings are its reflection and its footprint. It is not difficult to imagine the group gathered around the storyteller, the one in charge of preserving the group memory, while he tells, dances, and represents the exploits drawn on the rocks and protected in his memory. Through these ritual narratives, the forces of emotional currents from within that are projected to the outside are managed in an attempt to understand and contain them.
In mythological stories, narratives and popular tales, human conflicts are externalized to become aware of them, integrate them and give them meaning whether at a collective or individual level.
These representations, myths and stories evolve as the collective and individual mind of humanity evolves, they evolve as we gain greater knowledge of the forces that move within us, the emotions, and we appropriate them as something intrinsic to us.
The role of children’s stories and stories
We observe a similar evolutionary process in children’s stories and stories The first narratives that children are attracted to are those that tell magical and concrete stories, starring equally fantastic characters, who are given supernatural forces, powers that escape the control of childhood.
These characters, stereotypes and forced caricatures of good and evil represent the different emotional states that the small child finds so difficult to integrate into the same person.
The stories share a structure In it we find ourselves faced with a loss or conflict that the protagonist has to face, and throughout the development of the story the allied forces and the opposing forces will be presented. The story becomes a plot where obstacles are overcome and the evildoers fall before the expertise and kindness of the allies; Furthermore, as the plot progresses, the protagonist acquires these values in himself or discovers that he already had them, without having noticed them.
through imagination the child creates a fantasy world in which he identifies with the characters, recognizing through them feelings such as fear, courage, joy, frustration, overcoming hardships… feelings that they will later be able to see reflected in others and in themselves. In childhood, magical characters and stories facilitate contact with unexpressed fears and dreams, and in this way they allow for a positive resolution that the child is not capable of reaching on his own or his environment does not allow him to reach. can provide.
The qualities of the symbolic
For Jung, the representations of myths, legends and stories are shared archetypes, they are symbolic continuities arising from the unconscious; Each era transforms them in its iconology, but their meanings and contents remain presumably unchanged. These contents will then appear through the imagination and will take shape in games, drawings or stories and own narratives
The difficulties and problems presented in the stories allow us to give meaning to the experiences that the child lives without personalizing them for himself so that it is easier to manage his pain.
Children themselves choose the stories or are fascinated by those that tell them something about themselves or the circumstances they are experiencing, which encourages them to identify with some bit of their history or qualities. They ask to be told over and over again until they intuitively absorb the content that helps them in that story
The difficulties and problems presented in the stories allow us to give meaning to the experiences that the child lives without personalizing them for himself, so that it is easier to manage his pain. They allow you to develop your own experience through the metamorphosis of the characters represented. They are attracted to those who present stories in which they identify themselves without knowing it and facilitate intuitive integrations that they can later elaborate in a more conscious way.
Similar stories, shrouded in the fog of the dreamlike and magical contents of the stories, They allow and facilitate the first approaches to pain, adversity and uncertainty of the achievements of development.
The power of stories is even greater if they are transmitted in the warmth of the lap, maternal, paternal or of a caring grandfather or grandmother who accompany with a voice modulated between whispers on the initiatory journey that is going to be undertaken. The stories told in this way become an intimate act, in which the child is accompanied on that journey of discovery, and the monsters and sphinxes he encounters are dominated from the safety of warm and strong arms that protect.
Its therapeutic potential
Stories allow you to reinvent your story or difficult chapters and transform them and you transform yourself with them.
Thus, stories become therapeutic elements, they are part of the arts that heal emotional wounds. In my opinion, Every child therapist carries a storyteller inside him or her, which jumps out at the right moment providing a good story or story that the child can identify with. In this way, personalized stories emerge, narratives created and dedicated to a specific child.
This act of creation, whether on the part of the parents, loved ones or the therapist, makes this story doubly magical, because the child sees himself as the center of the mental acts of the adults, who attend not only to his behavior, but also to what it does or what it does not do, but It goes further and reaches your emotions, unspoken emotions, and perhaps not yet well perceived that appear timidly or hide abruptly and thoughts or beliefs that one does not dare to formulate or glimpse.
That creative act where the child is the center of the author’s mind and heart makes him or her someone very special for a magical moment, while the story lasts, at the center of the Universe. This way of being the Center can be one of the most special emotions of childhood if it takes place in the haze of the imaginary with one foot in the heat of the present stamped by the intonation of the voice and the attention paid to the child’s emotional response. .
And in this way Many child therapists become creators of stories, of personalized stories that we give away in the heat of the intervention and that the children we work with take them, not so much in the form of manuscripts, but as a code that helps translate the implicit experience of unelaborated affects into the world of words .
These stories are sometimes transformed into more general versions that we publish with the intention of them becoming resources for families, educators or children. We know the captivating power that a story that one identifies with can have and from there we hope to reach as many people as possible who can identify with those created stories. Probably the same author was the first to build himself with it and it served him as a way of understanding or self-elaboration or as a way of approaching that secret inner world, surrounded by uncontrollable forces of nature, which never cease to be, that emotional world. unknown psychological.
Let’s not lose the stories, let’s not lose their sound, let’s not lose their relational closeness in the act of being told, let’s not lose its beginning, plot and end. There is no screen that reflects a game of repetitive feats and disproportionate violence played alone or among distant equals, who cannot guide you. There is no game seen like this that can become a map of the emotional underground world that in a subtle, symbolic and intuitive way discovers new exits.
That desire to tell has led me to publish two stories “How can I get out of here?” and “Tell me when I nested in a gut and was born”; Soon another story I hope will also see the light, at the same time that I become a champion defender of stories and their power.
Author: Cristina Cortés Viniegra, Director of VITALIZA De la Salud.
