The importance of stories

I find it difficult to get used to the loss of stories; in fact, I am reluctant to lose the literary beauty of stories and their subtle (and beautiful) ability to delve into the emotional world and help organize and cope with it.

We are storytellers, of stories through which we have been learning and at the same time have become a route, an encrypted map to overcome both collective fears and individual. The 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.

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The development of narratives

As a species, we carry out our first narratives and stories through representations and symbols. In them we tell each other the stories of our day to day and above all we highlight the threats, the achievements and the extraordinary.

The cave paintings are his reflection and his mark. It is not difficult to imagine the group gathered around the storyteller, the one in charge of preserving the group memory, while counting, dancing, represents the feats drawn on the rocks and protected in their memory. Through these ritual narratives, the forces of the emotional currents of the interior that are projected to the exterior are managed in an attempt to understand and contain them.

In mythological stories, narratives and folk tales, human conflicts are externalized to become aware of them, integrate them and give them meaning either at the collective or individual level.

Those representations, myths and stories evolve as the collective and individual mind of humanity evolves, they evolve as we go having a greater knowledge of the forces that move inside us, the emotions, and we are appropriating them as something intrinsic to U.S.

The role of children's stories and stories

We observe a similar evolutionary process in children's stories and stories. The first stories that children are drawn to are those that tell magical and concrete stories, starring equally fantastic characters, given supernatural forces, powers beyond their control from childhood.

These characters, stereotypes and forced caricatures of good and evil represent the different emotional states that the young child finds it so difficult to integrate into the same person.

The stories share a structure. In it we are faced with a loss or conflict that the protagonist has to face, and throughout the development of the story the allied forces and the opposition forces will be presented. The story becomes a plot where obstacles are overcome and the wicked fall before the skill and goodness of the allies; Furthermore, as the plot unfolds, the protagonist acquires those 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 from this form they allow to elaborate a positive resolution to which the child alone is not able to reach or the environment of him cannot 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 epoch transforms them in its iconology, but their meanings and contents presumably remain unchanged. These contents will then appear through the imagination and will take shape in games, drawings or stories and their own narratives..

The difficulties and problems presented in the stories make it possible to make sense of the experiences that the child lives without personalizing them in himself so that it is easier to handle his pain.

Children by themselves choose the stories or are fascinated by those that tell them something about themselves or the circumstances that they are living, which favors an identification with some little piece of their history or qualities. They ask to be told over and over again until they intuitively absorb the content that helps them from that story.

The difficulties and problems presented in the stories make it possible to make sense of the experiences that the child lives without personalizing them in himself, so that it is easier to handle 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 unknowingly identify and facilitate intuitive integrations that they can later elaborate in a more conscious way.

Similar stories, shrouded in the mist of the dreamlike and magical contents of the tales, allow and facilitate the first approaches to pain, adversity and uncertainty of the conquests 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 modulated voice between whispers on the initiatory journey that is undertake. The stories thus told become an intimate act, in which the child is accompanied on this journey of discovery, and the monsters and sphinxes he encounters are dominated from the safety of warm and strong arms that protect.

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Its therapeutic potential

The stories allow you to reinvent your story or difficult chapters and transform them and transform yourself with them.

Thus, stories become therapeutic elements, they are part of the arts that heal emotional wounds. In my opinion, all or all child therapist, carries inside a storytelling, which jumps in at the right moment providing a good story or story that the child can identify with. In this way, personalized stories arise, stories created and dedicated to a specific child.

That act of creation, whether by parents, relatives or the therapist, turns that story into doubly magical, because the child is seen as the center of the mental acts of adults, who attend not only to his behavior, what he does or what he does not do, but goes further and reaches their emotions, emotions not said, and perhaps not yet well perceived that shyly appear or hide abruptly and thoughts or beliefs that you do not dare to formulate or glimpse.

That creative act where the child is the center of the mind and the heart of the author makes him someone very special for a magical moment, while the story lasts, in 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 what imaginary with one foot in the heat of the present timbred by the intonation of the voice and the attention paid to the emotional response of the child.

And in this way many child therapists become story creators, personalized stories that we give away in the heat of the intervention and that the children we work with take them away, not so much in the form of manuscripts, but as a code that helps to translate the implicit experience of raw affects into the world of words.

These stories are sometimes transformed into more general versions that we publish with the intention that they become resources for both families, educators or children. We know the captivating power that a story with which one identifies can have and from there we hope to reach as many people as possible who can relate to those stories created. Probably the same author was the first to build himself with it and it served him as a way of understanding or elaborating himself or as a way of approach that inner secret world, surrounded by uncontrollable forces of nature, which do not cease to be, that emotional psychological world a stranger.

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 between distant equals, who cannot guide you. There is no game thus envisioned 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 did nest in a gut and I was born"; shortly 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.