Making meaning through stories

(and news of a new podcast)

Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse

I’m so fascinated by stories. I used to be a Dramatherapist, and worked with story extensively. In Dramatherapy (one of the four Creative Arts Psychotherapies), the therapist and the client or group often use story as a container. What this essentially means is that, rather than sit down and talk directly about something in the client’s life that has caused, or continues to cause them pain, you instead use the metaphor of the story as a container for those same feelings. Through exploring story, whether you write letters to the characters, make masks, enact moments or scenes, paint pictures, move your body to show the feelings of different characters, or use empty chairs to talk to them (and much much more), you gain some ‘distance’ from your own reality, and, immersed in the story instead, you often feel safer and more able to access feelings.

For example, when I worked in a drug and alcohol rehab with groups of adults in recovery, we would often work with a scene from the Ted Hughes stage adaptation of The Odyssey, the part where Odysseus has to get past the Sirens. He instructs his crew to tie him to the mast, and to fill their own ears with wax. But he doesn’t fill his own ears, because he wants to hear their song and live. They row past the Sirens, and he strains at his ropes and begs his sailors to release him. But they don’t. And, unlike many other men before him, he hears their song and lives.

It’s not difficult to see how a person in recovery might relate to the story. As well as relating to Odysseus, they may also wonder, what part of me is the Sirens? What part the ropes? What about the mast? Do I have that aspect of myself, or is there someone in my life who plays that role? And the wax? And the boat? And the sea itself? Each part of the story can come to represent a part of the psyche; each in its own way a container for what are often hugely difficult feelings, and for all the many dimensions of a person’s story, both real and psychological. And like all good stories, the scene has unanswered questions - the most obvious one being, why not put the wax in your own ears too? I have been privileged to be present for many discussions with people for whom alcohol and drugs have been a destructive force, as we all talked about Odysseus - and sometimes even to him - “What’s your problem mate? Why the ego? What are you trying to prove?”. Sometimes we’d circle back and ask - how does this relate to you and your own life? But it wasn’t always necessary. Stories very often go to work on the psyche with or without the supervision of the conscious mind. It’s their job, like arrows finding a target or bees taking pollen to the hive.

Working for so long with ‘stories as metaphor’ has somehow given my brain the habit of seeing almost everything as metaphor, in the sense of being some kind of container for feelings which are often otherwise hidden. Children in therapy will often tell you of their physical ailments (and I’ve noticed my own children do this too). “I banged my arm today, it really hurts.” Adults will often tell kids who say these things that there is nothing to worry about, or even to ‘toughen up’. But sometimes (not always), the story is a container. They are saying to us, “I am hurting”. So you can join in their story and speak within the safety of their metaphor. “Oh no, I’m so sorry, what has it been like to have that pain all day?” “That must have been really hard for you” “What have you done to cope?” “Well done for keeping going even when you were struggling with that.”. Often our superficial frustrations, or our career choices, or our hobbies, or our most vivid dreams, or the pains in our legs, or the stories we tell about all of these things and more, are just metaphors for the deeper stuff.

The stories we tell about the female body - and about our own female bodies - have been the focus of much of my writing. “When you give birth you have to just leave your dignity at the door”. “A healthy baby is all that matters” “I wanted a home birth but they did not let me” “It’s said they sometimes put in an extra ‘husband stitch’” (The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado is another story worth reading, and a container for a great deal more) “The heroic sperm wins the race against all the others to get to the egg”. All of these stories are in some ways metaphors and, when explored, unpicked and challenged, can tell us a great deal about women’s journey through history and how they are perceived in the current culture. This week it was a privilege to speak in real life to Holly Dunsworth, anthropology professor at the University of Rhode Island. “While my obsession with ancient human fossils got me into this field, I became obsessed with the stories we tell about them”, she wrote in the ‘bio’ I asked her for. When Holly heard the story of the ‘obstetric dilemma’ - the idea that human birth is ‘extra difficult’ because our babies have brains too big for our pelvis - instead of taking it at face value, fitting as it did so perfectly into the wider narrative that says ‘women’s bodies are a bit of a problem’, she explored it, unpicked it, and challenged it. “The stories we tell in evolutionary science weave together the facts”, she told me. “The number one product of science is for us to make meaning of where we come from and who we are, and we do that with stories, and sometimes those stories about the facts are good solid stories, and sometimes they’re complete bullshit.”

Holly was speaking to me for Give Birth like a Feminist, a new podcast I’ve launched about birth as a feminist issue. I would have set it up as part of this substack, but it seemed like it was complicated to have more than one podcast under the same substack umbrella. So, you can find it via Anchor, or on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and soon (in the next few days), Google podcasts. Do have a listen to how she listened to the story about the female pelvis, and instead of accepting it as fact, saw it instead as containing truth and meaning about the story teller: men. It was a story about how men perceived women and motherhood, and she unpicked it and challenged it for sure.

I’ve finished my first draft of the second chapter of ‘book 4’ now, and am on to chapter 3. I have ranged through so many ideas in the second chapter, and it’s now with the editor, so we will see what she thinks. I feel like I’ve begun to really gallop more enthusiastically with the book now, but she may feel otherwise! In the next chapter, I’m going to be exploring creation, both literally, through human pregnancy, and metaphorically, through both the stories we tell about the female body, and the stories we tell about creation and creative power. Through unpicking and challenging all of these stories, I hope to - paradoxically - get closer to the truth.