The importance of stories

Stories are an important tool for emotional and cultural expression.

I find it hard to get used to the loss of stories.In fact, I am reluctant to lose the literary beauty of stories and their subtle (and beautiful) ability to enter the emotional world and help organize and cope with it.

We are storytellers, storytellers through which we have been learning and at the same time they have become a route, an encrypted map to overcome both collective and individual fears. Narrative is part of our evolutionary process as the social beings that we are; we want to transmit and leave a mark.We want to transmit and leave a footprint and teachings for the future that transcend beyond their time.

The development of narratives

As a species, our first narratives and stories were made by means of representations and symbols. In them, we tell the stories of our we tell the stories of our daily life and above all we highlight threats, achievements and extraordinary events..

Cave paintings are their reflection and their imprint. It is not difficult to imagine the group gathered around the storyteller, the one in charge of preserving the group memory, while he tells, dances, represents the exploits drawn on the rocks and protected in his memory. Through these ritual narratives, the forces of the emotional currents of the interior are managed and projected to the exterior in an attempt to understand and contain them.

In mythological stories, narratives and folktales, human conflicts are externalized in order to become conscious of them, to integrate them and to give them a sense whether at the collective or individual level.

These representations, myths and stories evolve as the collective and individual mind of humanity evolves, they evolve as we become more aware of the forces that move within us, the emotions, and we appropriate them as something intrinsic to us.

The role of children's stories and tales

A similar evolutionary process can be observed in children's stories and tales.. The first narratives to which children are attracted are those that tell magical and concrete stories, starring equally fantastic characters, who are given supernatural forces, powers beyond the control of childhood.

These characters, stereotypes and forced caricatures of good and evil represent the different emotional states that the young child finds so difficult to integrate in the same person.

The stories share a common structure. In it we are faced with a loss or conflict that the protagonist has to face, and throughout the development of the story the allied forces and opposing forces will be presented. The story becomes a plot where obstacles are overcome and the wicked fall before the skill and goodness of the allies; in addition, as the plot progresses, the protagonist acquires these values in himself or discovers that he already had them, without having noticed them.

Through imagination the child creates a fantasy world in which he/she identifies with the characters, recognizing through them feelings and emotions.through them, recognizing feelings such as fear, courage, joy, frustration, overcoming hardships... feelings that they will later be able to see reflected in others and in themselves. In infancy, magical characters and stories facilitate contact with unexpressed fears and dreams, and in this way make it possible to elaborate a positive resolution that the child alone is not capable of reaching or that his environment cannot provide.

The qualities of the symbolic

For Jung the representations of myths, legends and tales are shared archetypes, they are symbolic continuities arising from the unconscious; each epoch transforms them in its iconology, but their meanings and contents remain presumably unchanged. These contents will then appear through the imagination and will take shape in games, drawings or stories and narratives of their own..

The difficulties and problems presented in the stories make it possible to give meaning to the child's experiences without personalizing them to him or herself, so that it is easier to manage the child's pain.

Children themselves choose the stories or are fascinated by those that tell them something about themselves or the circumstances they are living through, which leads to an identification with some part of their history or qualities. They ask to be told over and over again until they intuitively absorb the helpful content of the story..

The difficulties and problems presented in the stories make it possible to make sense of the child's experiences without personalizing them to him/herself, so that it is easier to manage his/her pain. They allow them to elaborate their own experience through the metamorphosis of the characters represented. They are attracted to those who present stories in which they unknowingly identify themselves and facilitate intuitive integrations that they can later elaborate in a more conscious way.

Similar stories, wrapped in the mist of the dreamlike and magical contents of the tales, and facilitate the first approaches to the pain, adversity and uncertainty of the conquests of development. of the conquests of development.

The power of stories is even greater if they are transmitted in the warmth of a mother's or father's lap, or that of a caring grandfather or grandmother who accompanies the child with a modulated voice between whispers in the initiatory journey that is about to be undertaken. The stories thus told become an intimate act, in which the child is accompanied in this voyage of discovery, and the monsters and sphinxes he or she encounters are tamed from the safety of warm and strong arms that protect.

Their therapeutic potential

Stories allow you to reinvent your story or difficult chapters and transform them and transform yourself with them.

Thus, stories become therapeutic elements, they are part of the arts that heal emotional wounds. In my opinion, every child therapist has a storyteller inside him or her, who jumps in at the right momentThe storyteller, who jumps at the right moment offering a good tale or story with which the child can identify. This is how personalized stories arise, narratives created and dedicated to a specific child.

This act of creation, whether by parents, relatives or the therapist, makes the story doubly magical, because the child is seen as the center of the mental acts of adults, who pay attention not only to his behavior, what he does or does not do, but also to his emotions. goes beyond that and reaches his emotions, emotions not said, and perhaps not yet well perceived that peek timidly or hide themselves abruptly and thoughts or beliefs that he does not dare to formulate or glimpse.

That creative act where the child is the center of the author's mind and Heart makes him or her very special for a magical moment, for the duration of the story, the center of the Universe. This way of being the Center can be one of the most special emotions of childhood if it takes place in the mist of the imaginary with one foot in the warmth of the present timed by the intonation of the voice and the attention paid to the emotional response of the child.

And in this way many of us child therapists become creators of stories, of personalized tales that we give away in the heat of the intervention and that the children we work with take with them, not so much in the form of manuscripts, but as a code that helps to translate the implicit experience of unelaborated affections into the world of words.

These stories are sometimes transformed into more general versions that we publish with the intention of becoming resources for both families, educators and children. We know the captivating power that a story that one identifies with can have and from there we hope to reach as many people as possible who can identify with these created stories. Probably the author himself was the first to build with it and it served him as a way of understanding or own elaboration or as a way to approach that secret inner world, surrounded by uncontrollable forces of nature, which are still, that unknown psychological emotional world.

Let's not lose the stories, let's not lose their sonority, let's not lose their relational closeness in the act of being told, let's not lose their beginning, their beginning, their beginning, their beginning, their beginning.Let us not lose their beginning, plot and ending. There is no screen that reflects a game of repetitive feats and disproportionate violence played in solitude or among distant peers, who cannot guide you. There is no game thus glimpsed that can become a map of the emotional underworld that subtly, symbolically and intuitively discovers new exits.

This eagerness to tell has led me to publish two stories "How can I get out of here?" and "Tell me when I did nest in a belly and I was born"; soon I hope another story will also see the light, at the same time that I become a champion of stories and their power.

Author: Cristina Cortés Viniegra, Director of VITALIZA De la Salud.