Story Clinic with Dr Walter Willies
Every month, Walter will be showing us more how to the change our life by changing our stories. Here’s your invitation to the ‘Clinic’.
Health, finance, marriages and aliveness itself, we tend to take them and much else we don’t really understand for granted, until they go wrong.
We understand all these things, and what they mean, through the ‘words’ we use and we also really believe that words in themselves mean something. We trust language, more than we realise. We think our lives depend on us using it to be rational, avoiding being irrational and as for the non-rational, we don’t know what at all to do with it.
So it’s surprising to learn that, because the cosmos doesn’t use words as part of its myriads of chemical, physical and organic processes, it is non-rational. These processes just get on with themselves, largely ignoring our human proclamations and promises, while they change state, bond, combust and behave as good chemistry, physics and maths should.
Storytelling is an overcooked item, already, applied to branding, personal power, political narratives and psychological strategy. But as a species, in addition to language, our ability to tell stories is critical as a means to understanding anything and, used in a subtle, reflective way, of shifting our lives.
The Story Clinic is storytelling some steps ahead of ‘story telling’. It’s a way to ‘get better’ by purposefully utilising a space of presence, like any clinic, where we can pay attention to those chunks of reality that our brain creates, the loops of perception, the purposes of which are so elusive.
We hardly know who we are, why we live, and how we are to proceed. So I’m going to explore the sense of story slowly, showing how it works, what we can do with it, and how ‘story’ seriously affects our health. As we do this, you’ll come to see how unconsciously you build stories about everything, and then believe them, often to your own detriment. The title of this first instalment is
“You’re sitting in the audience”.
You’re travelling, staring out of the window, barely noticing what’s passing by, hardly thinking about anything, just letting it all go by, when you’re tapped on the shoulder, and before you turn around a voice says to you, firmly and clearly, “You’re sitting in the audience”.
You can’t see who’s saying this, but the message is there, and suddenly you’re paying attention. And you’re halfway out of your seat as you readjust your level of alertness to this new intimation. It’s somewhat embarrassing to realise how long you’ve been sitting in the audience. Nearly everything has been done for you, and all you’ve had to do is get dressed in the morning, pitch up, fulfil your obligations, read your payslip, try to have a little fun, and then repeat.
That’s it. No more than that. That’s how we tend to live, and that’s a really boring story and neither heart nor brain enjoy it. This might not be you. You could be a CEO, a prime minister, an established professional, a mover and shaker, an entrepreneur, a celebrated actor, a famous author, a content parent. But check it out and see where you are on the continuum between sitting in the audience and being playwright of the drama.
We grow up tasting and testing the difference between domesticity and daring, docility and drama, and something within decides what’s comfortable. We all have our own way of sitting in the audience, and your gut reaction to this news will tell you the extent to which how healthy your seat is for you. It’s a point of departure for examining many things: passivity, purpose, engagement, excitement, exaggeration, desire, disgust, demand. But at least you’ve risen from your seat, for now, and your synapses are ready to reshape, reform and re-establish reality. That’s a remarkable achievement for a very small movement. You can go anywhere from here.
If you have a story that you feel needs to be retold, in order to better your life, get in touch with Walter.
Contacts:
Walter Willies
Emeritus professor of Narrative Studies, Western Orthodox University, European American University
The Story Clinic
Glasgow London New York Cape Town