After three decades of teaching, writing, and listening to people talk about their work and their worries, I’ve come to believe that stories don’t just entertain or instruct us, they heal us.

Whether it’s a twelve-year-old pupil finding their voice in a creative writing class, a postgraduate writer struggling with confidence, or a friend unravelling after a loss, I’ve noticed something striking: when people begin to shape their experiences into story, something in them begins to settle. The chaos of life gains form; pain becomes pattern; meaning emerges.

Recently, during my training in the Human Givens approach to therapy, this truth came back to me with fresh clarity. The Human Givens model (Griffin & Tyrrell, 2003) is an evidence-based approach that focuses on helping people meet their innate emotional needs in balance, for security, connection, attention, meaning, and autonomy among others. It recognises that we all have the inbuilt resources to do this: imagination, emotions, an observing self, rational thinking, memory, and a capacity for pattern-matching and dreaming. When these resources are engaged — particularly through guided imagery and metaphor — people can often move from distress towards equilibrium with surprising speed.

I’ve completed Parts 1 and 2 of my Human Givens training and am now preparing for Part 3, where I will work with clients under supervision. It has been a deep process of internalising the approach, learning not simply techniques but a way of seeing; one that honours how emotion, cognition, and imagination intertwine.

One moment in training showed me how story itself can be a catalyst for healing. I was working with a woman I’ll call Anna, a dance teacher who had been sidelined by a younger colleague she once mentored. The experience had left her hurt and angry. She wanted help preparing for a conversation with this person, so I guided her into relaxation and told a simple story about a dancing queen who built a palace of movement and joy. When a former pupil tried to claim the palace as her own, the queen didn’t fight; she danced again. Her rhythm filled the hall and reminded everyone where the music had begun.

As I spoke, Anna began to cry, not from distress, but recognition. The story was not subtle or clever; it was a mirror. It allowed her to name what she had built and to see, without defensiveness, that her creative legacy remained hers. The others in the room thought the metaphor too literal, but Anna left lighter, more grounded, her shoulders less tense, her voice steady. Sometimes what heals isn’t interpretation, but recognition; the moment when the story we hear meets the truth we’ve carried inside all along.

This experience led me to think again about catharsis, the term Aristotle used in Poetics to describe the purgation or purification of emotion that occurs through art and drama. For Aristotle, tragedy helps us experience pity and fear in a controlled, reflective way, releasing pent-up emotion and restoring balance. Plato, by contrast, distrusted poetry and theatre because they bypass rational control. He believed that strong emotion clouds judgement and should be excluded from his ideal Republic.

Modern neuroscience gives Plato partial vindication: when emotion runs high, the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s centre for rational thought — can be temporarily bypassed (LeDoux, 1998). Yet Aristotle’s intuition about the healing power of art also finds support in contemporary psychology. When we safely evoke and reframe emotion through narrative, the nervous system reorganises itself; the mind integrates what was fragmented.

The Human Givens approach tends to be cautious about catharsis for its own sake, recognising that reactivating trauma without guidance can deepen distress. But within a calm, focused state emotional release can become deeply therapeutic; what Human Givens practitioners call raising the emotional template. It is not about reliving pain, but completing an interrupted story so that energy once locked in conflict can flow again.

Storytelling, in this sense, offers both structure and release. As Jerome Bruner (1991) and Dan McAdams (2013) have shown, human beings make sense of their lives by organising experiences into narrative. The process of re-storying — especially when guided by empathy and imagination — helps us transform chaotic emotion into coherent meaning. When we retell our story with compassion, the body listens, and healing begins.

That’s why, alongside my academic and writing work, I am now exploring spaces where people can revisit and reframe their own narratives through conversation, metaphor, and gentle guided imagery. It draws on the Human Givens framework, mindfulness, and narrative psychology, but above all on our shared human capacity to imagine better endings.

If you’ve been wondering how to move forward from a stuck story — a conflict, a loss, a professional setback — this kind of work might help.

References

Aristotle (1996) Poetics. Translated by M. Heath. London: Penguin.
Bruner, J. (1991) ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, Critical Inquiry, 18(1), pp. 1–21.
Griffin, J. and Tyrrell, I. (2003) Human Givens: A New Approach to Emotional Health and Clear Thinking. Chalvington: HG Publishing.
LeDoux, J. (1998) The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
McAdams, D. P. (2013) The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. Revised edn. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plato (2003) The Republic. Translated by D. Lee. 2nd edn. London: Penguin.