The Healing Narrative – Telling Your Story

Facilitator: Claire Edmonds, Ph.D., R.P. Registered Psychotherapist

Narration is the process of telling the story of our experience. It can be written as a story or poetry, it can be drawn, painted, or collaged, any medium that helps you tell your story. It contains the facts, but also the feelings, impressions and images of the event as seen through your eyes. Narrative as a healing process is particularly helpful for working though medical experiences that may be traumatic.

As a therapist and as a cancer patient, Claire has learned that the narrative process allows us to string the beads of experience, place it in order, organize it in our minds and spirits so that we can rest more easily with it. It gives us a beginning, middle and end, and the opportunity to add more chapters as our lives unfold. It is also a process that nurtures self compassion. In this session Claire will describe the narrative process and share several of her own narratives of her cancer experience. We shall also try it out together as a group, with a simple writing exercise. Our goals are to acknowledge the traumas that cancer diagnosis and treatment bring for the patient and caregiver and to explore this technique as a channel for healing.