Health and Healing

Today, storytelling is gaining greater respect within the fields of medicine, mental health, and the ministry. We now know that words have profound recuperative effects and that storytelling—a series of words that we translate into pictures or images in our mind—can play an essential role in healing the mind, body, and spirit.

Through our work, the International Storytelling Center helps healthcare specialists, therapists, and those who minister to others to use storytelling to comfort the sick and dying, promote healing, and create a more nurturing environment for people to deal with the trials of pain, suffering, and grief.

A Success Story...

Little Alex was permanently paralyzed from the neck down as the result of an automobile accident. Suffering from the same type of injury that felled actor Christopher Reeve, the youngster was on a respirator. Since the accident, he had spoken only a few words.

When storyteller Michale Gabriel began telling him the story of The Three Bears, however, Alex suddenly blurted out whole sentences, helping her tell the story. Gabriel told him other stories, and one day Alex excitedly declared, "I want to tell you a story from inside my head." And he wove together a tapestry using characters that included chickens, bears, a ghost or two, and more. Gabriel was delighted.

"When he left the hospital," she says, "little Alex knew he was not limited by the body that now held him. He realized that through his imagination he could travel anywhere in the universe—and back again."

Gabriel, a specialist in using story in illness, death, and dying, has a hundred such stories to tell—tales of how storytelling has helped dying children become less afraid and of how sick children learned how to handle discomfort, confinement, and fear.