My friend Meghann Perry is passionate about promoting the practice of storytelling in the recovery community as a powerful tool for connection, personal transformation, and social justice. Storytelling is both a potent practice and an art form, and Meghann's work is dedicated to promoting storytelling as another "beautiful thread in our universal tapestry of recovery and community." We cannot disagree with that.
Sharing our stories with other people in recovery, and listening to theirs, is an art form with deep therapeutic value. Meghann reminds us that most of us carry a "personal mythology" into recovery with us—a core belief system about ourselves that is often accurate.
She facilitates powerful storytelling events and workshops that lead individuals to question what is true and what is not in the myths that have come to rule how we feel about ourselves and how we act in relation to those myths. Questioning those stories and myths must be a key focus at some time in our recovery.
Doing this work in community is powerful, not only for us personally, but for the recovery community and the world beyond it. What myths have you told yourself?
Have you shared them with others? We can heal our lives and our communities, one story at a time.