Working with stories part 3

Stories to move us through grief

Any time people have to accept loss, the grief cycle is triggered. To various degrees people experience shock and anger, denial, acceptance, letting go and reframing. This process is subtle for small things like having a trusted colleague moved to a different project but it can be full blown if people experience a trauma such as a death or a similar emotional upheaval.

Change brings loss, and because change is constant, so is the emotional response to what is being lost. In other words, as my colleague Birgitt Williams is fond of saying, “there is always grief in the room.” Working with grief is a key skill for facilitators and storytelling turns out to be an important way people move through loss and get to a reframing stage in their lives, with an ability to see possibility in the future.

Sudden change triggers a defensive mechanism. We get our backs up, express shock and experience anger at the way our world has been shaken. And then, as if to stem the tide, we engage in denial strategies to try to stave off the reality of the situation. To move through this and accept the fact of change, it helps to be able to remember and honour what has been lost. And so stories become a very important part of the grieving process. This is why we create space for stories at funerals. In Maori culture, friends and family gather in the whara nui (big house) with the body of the deceased to tell the unvarnished truth of the life which has ended. Relatives get to hear the full story, the good and bad (and sometimes the ugly) as people come to remember the dead.

This process helps the whole community to remember the person and to accept the death. It also serves as a catharsis to enable people to move on. Likewise, in organizational life, telling stories is a very important way to deal with large scale changes.

I was recently working with an organization that was experiencing a lot of staff dissension and management turnover. People seemed to be fighting over everything and there seemed to be no one cause for all the trouble. After talking with people for a while it became clear that the organization was facing a fundamental shift in its mandate and direction. This shift had come from the Board of Directors and had been refused by the Executive Director, a founder of the organization. He left angrily and the staff morale broke down after that. Over the course of a year, a once thriving and important regional organization became impotent and toxic.

This shift in direction was a very difficult thing to accept for the people who had worked for a long time in the organization. Many of them weren’t prepared to accept the change and it became clear that they were trying to hold on to the status quo as much as possible. Letting go was hard.

So, in preparation for a strategic planning retreat, we held a day of story telling, where the employees and the Board together could tell stories about the organization and the founder and the great work that had been accomplished. People honoured one another and the mood of the gathering was solemn but, like the aftermath of a storm, seemed to be clearing. The storytelling session gave the staff a chance to remember what had been and tangibly let it go, sometimes with humour, sometimes with tears. After several hours of storytelling, people became clearer, more able to envision an uncertain future. It made the subsequent work a little easier because people were more open to new things.

Story telling like this creates openness in a situation that feels like the walls are closing in. When people are under stress and in conflict it is usually a sign that the emotional space they share has become too small. Storytelling sessions, in the truly natural, round-the-campfire, natural mode can have the effect of both releasing emotional energy and building a new shared emotional space. And sometimes to move forward, that is the kind of ground you need to have sown.

Next, how remembering stories from the past help us to move forward secure in the knowledge of who we are.