In our previous post, we shared the first half of a reflection about our new friend Molly’s time at Love & Hope Children’s Home. During her stay, Molly shared a good deal about the importance of our pasts, our stories, and our voices being heard. She personally made a point of talking to many of the children, staff and volunteers to learn about what helped shaped them into the people they are today. Molly also collaborated with our friend, psychiatrist Alex Harrison, to teach our staff how to tell their personal stories and encourage stories from our children:
In my final week at Love and Hope, I co-taught a workshop with Harvard psychiatrist Alex Harrison, who consults frequently at the home. Through this experience, I connected to the community and myself in a new way. Alex and I had worked for a few weeks to develop a workshop that we hoped would strengthen the vibrant relationship networks central to healthy communities. We focused on storytelling, which has powerful relationship-building and healing capacities. When people tell stories, they connect with others, express their feelings, and, in fact, reinforce the networks in the brain that organize reality into coherent narratives. Traumatized children like those at Love and Hope often struggle with those very things, for they have learned from inconsistent families that it’s dangerous to rely on others; they hold tremendous pain within them; and, finally, their hardships have affected their brains’ narrative-making pathways. Trauma often affects the neurobiological processes that create memories and construct accounts consistent with reality. The children in the home, therefore, often have trouble remembering and telling stories, but it’s very important that they do so. Even sharing made-up tales links them to caregivers and peers and helps reorganize their brains in healthy ways.
After explaining all this, we practiced storytelling by sharing anecdotes from our childhoods in small groups and talking in a large circle about our own primary caregivers growing up. The neurobiological benefits of story-sharing take place over time with repeated behavior, but we saw the activity’s connective forces take effect immediately. During the workshop, staff members laughed and cried as they recognized common experiences. Recalling what they were like as young kids, many said they finally understood why it seemed so hard for some of the home’s children to do their schoolwork or go to bed on time.
As I heard the stories of those with whom I’d been working for nearly a month, I felt close to them in a new way. We had touched on the living heart of the community: the varied, human identities that form it. I realized how much I love interacting in this way; and furthermore, I saw that positive change could come from this simple practice. After the workshop, we saw kids and caregivers sitting in circles, sharing memories and laughing, asking questions and gesturing animatedly. I think there was a renewed sense of mutual investment and care.
I am thankful for the welcome I received from Love and Hope and its greater community, and I feel blessed to have had the special experience that I did.
Love & Hope feels blessed to have met you, Molly. Thank you for all of your help and insight! We can’t wait to have you visit us again.