When I first experienced the power of story as ‘healing’ for challenging behaviour – both in my own and other people’s children – it felt as though a light had illumined the dark. As time went by, my parenting and teaching turned increasingly to such ‘story lights’ as I started interweaving wisdom tales from other cultures with my own story-making.
Many years later, while working as a teacher trainer in East Africa, I discovered a beautiful Kiswahili word that captured this illumined experience: ‘ANGAZA’ – ‘to light up’ …. Hadithi kwa kuangaza usiku – Stories to light up the night.
The aim of this book is twofold: to share these ‘story lights’ with you, and to help you create your own healing stories. Working with both modern and traditional tales, and many personal stories, the following chapters offer imaginative possibilities for transforming problematic behaviour and situations with children. They also provide teachers, parents, childcare workers and child therapists with a range of skills to create stories that address challenging behaviour.
Included in the text are eighty stories divided into different behaviour categories for easy reference – to work with directly, adapt, or use as models for creating your own tales. Brief notes precede each story, with an age guide and suggestions for use. The categories cover many kinds of commonly identified challenging behaviour, from dishonesty through laziness to teasing and bullying; everyday situations like ‘tidy-up time’; experiences such as ‘moving house’; or problems and difficulties such as ‘separation anxiety’, ‘fear and nightmares’ and ‘illness and grieving’.
The range of selected stories and ideas are suitable for ages three to eight. However, stories often elbow their way out of the boxes we make for them. Sometimes a story written for a child may have a transformative effect on a teenager or an adult. Examples of this are shared through the book.
It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you.
Ben Okrii
If you feel inspired to write your own therapeutic tales, the text provides a story-making model – a threefold framework of ‘Metaphor’, ‘Journey’ and ‘Resolution’ – to guide you. Based on a dictionary definition of healing – ‘Bring into balance, become sound or whole’, therapeutic stories for challenging behaviour or challenging situations are presented here as stories that help restore equilibrium or wholeness where behaviour is in some way out of balance.
In this story-making model, metaphors help build the imaginative connection for the listener, embodying both the negative, un balancing, and the positive, rebalanced states. The journey itself builds the ‘tension’ as the story evolves, leading the plot into and through the behaviour ‘imbalance’ and out again to a wholesome, positive (not guilt-inducing) resolution.
Besides this framework, the book has chapters on age-appropriate stories, multicultural perspectives, props and presentation aids, and guidelines for the telling of stories. It is my hope, with some help from these sections, that you will feel encouraged to write and tell your own stories, and so perpetuate and develop age-old story traditions.
In many traditional cultures throughout human history, wise ‘elders’ have drawn naturally on metaphors and stories in their role as mentors and guides for the children in their tribes and communities. Using ‘wisdom tales’ to guide and invoke behaviour, they have tapped into children’s imaginative reality and reached children in positive, affirming ways. This book encourages a revival of such use of metaphor and story.
My advice to readers is to begin at the beginning and, without too much analysis and questioning, simply dive in and follow my ‘story journey’. Many personal anecdotes have been included here, hopefully to whet your appetite. Then you may wish to move to the third and fourth sections and read a few stories from different behaviour categories. When you feel you want to engage with the construction of these stories, and explore how to make up your own, return to the second section for help with ‘Writing Therapeutic Stories’. Finally, when you are ready to tell a story, refer to the last section for tips on ‘The Art of Storytelling’.
I have made no attempt to divide the resources into ‘parent’, ‘teacher’ and ‘therapist’ sections, since I believe there is so much over lap.
A parent could gain ideas for tidying in the home from a teacher’s story addressing lack of cooperation at group tidy-up time; a teacher could get inspiration from a story written by a parent to address dishonesty in the family; a therapist could both contribute to and learn from new ideas and metaphors for home and school situations.
Please remember that stories are not magic pills with powers to fix or heal all difficulties and challenges. Neither can there be a list of stories to suit every situation. Behaviour is relational and contextual. It can rarely be addressed in isolation. Each child exists and develops within an intricate web of relationships and environments – family, school, community and global. It is you, the practising reader, who is in direct touch with the relationships, context and individual characteristics of the children whom you parent, counsel and teach; you are best placed, therefore, to create stories for individual needs.
If this book achieves its main objective and inspires you to create healing stories for children, don’t get stuck on expecting perfection. Your stories may have cracks, but – to quote Leonard Cohen, ‘that’s how the light gets in’. What is important is that you give it a go! The light that gets in through the cracks may be your best teacher.
Ring the bells that still can ring; forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.ii
Healing Stories is the culmination of many years of practice, many years of ‘giving it a go’. Compiling these pages has been both a struggle and a pleasure. The theoretical framework has taken much effort. The stories themselves, spanning more than thirty years of parenting, teaching and counselling, have flowed more easily onto the pages.
From several decades of running storytelling workshops and seminars, my general experience is that our inner ‘storyteller’ is once again seeking ways to unfold and shine forth. This book is a contribution to the universal revival of story in family, school and community life. I hope you will find treasures within these pages to help bring the healing light of story to the children in your care. Susan Perrow, September 2007
| i | Ben Okri: Birds of Heaven, London: Phoenix 1996 |
| ii | Leonard Cohen, in his song ‘Anthem’ |