- Image by StarbuckGuy via Flickr
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.
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