A great array of interesting content has continued to emerge across the Stepping Stone Partner blogs. Have a look.
As students progress at the Family Foundation School, we ask them to sponsor other students in the way most Twelve Step programs use sponsors. We call them “junior sponsors,” because each student is assigned a staff member as a senior sponsor. Those not familiar with Twelve Step programs can think of this as mentorship.
As junior sponsors, our students learn to listen to others and withhold judgment. As sponsees, they learn to share their feelings and to admit to fears they would not admit to themselves. They learned to look for resentment in their story and in those of others.
They’ve learned that constructing a self is hard work—as is novel writing. Our graduation speeches are often about the struggles the student has experienced here. Our students have discovered emotion and work—essential to telling a good story.
In addition to these analytic techniques, the program gives its story tellers a pattern–what it was like—how we changed—what it is like now. Many literary critics of the twentieth century have tried to define the number and types of patterns in stories. While various critics disagree on the exact number, most concur that there are a limited number of patterns (plots) and that writers more often hold our interest through character and setting.
The AA pattern seems to me to be a number of things—first it is a pattern of hope. Recovery is possible. Second it strikes me as a romantic plot—in the classic versus romantic sense—not as a love story. This pattern assumes that people are always changing, always growing. Persons who have been in AA awhile and spoken at a number of meetings know that they rewrite the story in each telling, because they have changed since they told it last. As Goethe says, “man is always becoming, never is.” And third this pattern is a basic American plot often seen in melodrama and comedy. A struggle is successful and people are stronger because of it.
Finely any useful theory of story telling must include ideas about audience. The AA story has a specified audience those who came to a meeting seeking help. So our graduation speeches are not for the students’ families, or even for themselves. They are for the students who are remaining at the school and who are in the midst of the struggle. They see their friends successfully telling themselves and acquire hope that too can do this. That is why it takes three days to graduate our class.
Self and Story I
Self and Story II
(Read more of Sid’s work at Old Before Wise.)
Stories are so important to the twelve step work we do with our students that we allow every graduate to speak at graduation. This gives us a three day event , but it allows our students to reflect on their lives, their progress, and how they will present themselves to the world.
All our students come in with a story. Our most common one begins, “if only.” If only, I wasn’t adopted. If only, my parents didn’t get divorced. If only, my mother had lived. If only, Fred hadn’t offered me cocaine. It is a narrative in which the narrator finds him or herself constructed by events over which there was no control and therefore no way to fix the out come—at least nothing the narrator could do—he was just there.
We have some other patterns—the would be superman who is impervious to society’s rules, the hero who fights the injustice she finds in every authority, the true love blighted story and a few others. In general these are almost always inauthentic stories, by which I don’t mean they’re false, but that avoid the true feeling, the true pain, and often the true responsibility.
So what narrative skills do we give our students? How are they better equipped to construct themselves and their stories? First we give them a set of Heuristics—fancy word for questions and ideas to start from. These vary from the fairly simple set of clichés to profound ways of looking at the world.
The most important of these is inventory, a term that derives from the fourth step and which asks us to look not only at our actions but our motives. In a variety of settings we ask students to examine their motives and their actions. What did they do and why did they do it? After they have been her awhile most students get pretty proficient in doing that, but the question the students dread is, “what is your inventory for telling the story this way?” Don’t tell us your inventory as a character in the story, but your inventory as a writer of it. We learn to see that how we tell our story reveals who we are.
(Continue reading here.)
Read Self and Story Part I also.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by stories. I grew up with great story tellers and I know I am shaped by my grandfather’s stories as well as my own. Early on I became fascinated by how stories were told and who told them and thus my career path was shaped. Since coming to the Family Foundation School, I have learned how important shaping our story and telling our story are to the recovery process.
If I were still in that professorial part of my life where I wrote pretensions literary essays, I would title these remarks, “Telling ourselves: the construction of narrative as the construction of self.” What I mean by the construction of self? Isn’t the self just there a given of nature? Without giving a long philosophic set of references that would run through all the greats of Existentialist philosophy and continue until today, I want to argue that our “Self” is a construction and that the basic building blocks of that construction are the ways we explain the seeming random events of this life. Self is, in part, the way we make causal connections to the outside world.
This sense of causality is also at the heart of narrative. As the British novelist E. M Forester wrote; “The king died. The queen died is not a story. The king died: the Queen died of grief is a story.” It is this insistence on a cause that links random events that creates narrative.
If we think about how we educate children and the role popular culture plays in our lives, we will see that this is not a radical idea. The teaching of language and writing through the reading of stories is a not so subtle method of getting small children to grasp the idea of causality without explaining it to them.When they get to a science or a math class where they need to articulate rules about causes, the basic idea is already there imbedded through years of hearing, watching, and reading stories.
Additionally stories give us patterns of behavior, judgments on right and wrong, ideals to aspire to, and ways to discuss our feelings by discussing characters. Who has not pretended to be Superman, Wonder Woman, or my favorite childhood super hero—Plastic Man? In short through our culture’s narratives we learn how to examine our life and how to construct a self. Some anthropologists would argue that a culture’s narratives set the pattern and limits of the self in that society.
Story telling then and story reading are essential parts of education. They are also I think essential parts of maturation and recovery.
(continued here.)
New Screening Question
