Soul Making and the Stories We Tell

“To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself.”
James Hillman

The power of story telling

We all tell stories and everyone has a story. It is fundamental to the way we communicate, think, and connect with others. Authentic story engages us. There is resonance. We know we have heard a good story because our imaginations are activated; we feel it emotionally. These are the stories that touch us, teach us, inspire us, and connect us to universal truths. Think about it. We remember people’s stories more than we remember what they do for a living or their accomplishments; and the timeless universal stories link us to ancient traditions, myths, fairy tales and archetypes. The soul’s metaphors are found in the plot lines of hero’s journeys, redemption, tragedy, trials, fate, love lost and regained, and betrayal.

Meaning making and the child self

Story telling comes from the right side of the brain. This side develops first, coming on-line in the first 6 months of life. It is the relationship centre, the part that is in charge of our emotions, connections, self-awareness, empathy, and trust. The more rational side of the brain, the part connected with identifying facts, logic, reasoning, and rationality develops later.

When we experience relational injuries, when we can’t get our basic needs met, or when we crave love and attention, it is the right side of the brain that processes the injury. We then create a story about it that helps us to frame the experience, and we make a decision about what we need to do, or to be to get what we need.

The meaning that we create from our early life events form the seminal stories that shape our perceptions and interpretation of life. These stories drive our beliefs, attitudes and much of our behaviour; and are most often unconscious. Those interpretations and the decisions create emotional patterns that plague us later in life.

When our young self fashions the story of why and what the events mean, it comes almost exclusively from the right side of the brain, and becomes collapsed with the facts of the situation. It can then become a prison in which we remain trapped. At the root of many of the early stories is the fear that we are not enough in some way; and these stories become the basis for the litany of negative self-talk that we tell ourselves later – “I am not good enough”, “I need to be perfect” , “I am not loveable”, “I can’t do it”, “I don’t matter”, “I am not important”, “I am never going to get what I want or need”, “I am never going to be happy”, “I am a victim”, etc.

Jung said “what we don’t make conscious comes to us in the form of fate”. Thus life has an uncanny way through synchronicity to confront us with events and people that challenge the old stories that prevent us from living life fully.

James Hillman – Healing Fiction

James Hillman suggests “our lives may be determined less by our childhoods than by the way we have learned to imagined our childhoods”. He argues that current psychological theories of personality and development reinforce a plot line of our lives that is focus on the outer events. By understanding our life from only what happened to us, we create a false duality between outer reality and the inner life of the soul.

Hillman’s notions of a re-visioned psychology views our life history as told in therapy as works of poetic fiction. It is a provocative idea. The definition of fiction implies something that is invented, an illusion or otherwise untrue. But it also means something created by the imagination. Soul plays and lives in the imagination. According to Hillman, the awareness of the therapeutic value of story is good for the soul. Stories are the containers for organizing outer events into meaningful experiences. Storytelling is a means of being psychological.

He writes: “In deep analysis, the analyst and the patient together re-write the case history into a new story, creating a “fiction” in the collaborative work of the analysis. Some of the healing that goes on, maybe even the essence of it, is this collaborative fiction, this putting all the chaotic and traumatic events of a life into a new story”

Soul-making and Hermes/Mercury

Soul-making is not about improving or developing the personality. It is certainly not about fixing. Approaching life’s experience from the perspective of soul-making, we subject outer events to a reflective speculation of the psychological process that leads to insight.

Jungian Analyst Evangelous Christou writes “the soul is to see analogically as the seat of psychological experience, just as the body is seat of sense perception , and the mind that of conception” Soul is the realm of inner experience and the reflections within that experience. Soul is vulnerable, suffers and is the stuff of emotions, feeling and all varieties of love. It also reflects our true nature and genuineness. Mary Stamper eloquently suggests that “to experience something psychologically is to come to terms with its subjective implications, to meet it on a feeling level, to be drawn into confrontation with it so much so that one feels no choice but to admit that one now sees some aspect of oneself more clearly.”

Symbols and metaphors are the best way for soul to speak about itself, that is, through dreams, fantasies, visions, synchronicities and the imagination. Soul is the place from which meaning and perspective grows that “mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens to us. Soul-making is the process of taking in outer events and seeing through them; moving from the outside to inside, from the visible to the less visible, and from the surface to the depth. We can then be open to insight and the creation of meaning that releases the past from the personal history, attachments and identifications. Hillman writes “Soul-making works against the historical influences of childhood and society in order to uncover a true ahistorical self and free it”.

This is the realm of the God Mercury/Hermes. He is the trickster, the god of communication, and the guide of souls. He is a healing fiction and the interpreter. His gift is insight and “when Hermes is at work in an analysis, one feels that one’s story has been stolen and turned into something else”

What are your stories?

What are the stories that you tell yourself and others? What language do you use to capture the tone of your story? Language is very powerful in shaping our emotions and how we perceive the world. Listening to the language we use can provide a clue to the unconscious story running in the background.

The value of therapy is to bring to consciousness all of our stories and bring them into the light of day; both the stories that limit us and the deeper stories of the soul. Reframing the former with the help of Mercury into soul-making, we must come to terms with certain aspects of our fate, and grieve lost childhoods; then shape insight into destiny and rich full life. We also gain access to the transpersonal divine center of the psyche that brings together the opposites towards the experience of wholeness.

July 2015
© Christina Becker
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