Life-changing loss, especially in its tragic forms, can break life stories as well as hearts. Expressive Storytelling supports a bereaved person’s adaptation to loss by gathering the shattered pieces, placing them on a chronological timeline, and retelling the crucial details through a therapeutic writing structure that encourages reconciliation and healing.
After my father’s death, I undertook an autoethnographic study to test whether written, first-person narrative storytelling could help me actively process and effectively move through my crippling, complicated grief. My data consisted of 41 short stories that disclosed the cultural interactions that occurred before, during, and after my father’s death while narrating the wildness of my prolonged grief. The results of this deeply personal experience led to the formulation of clear guidelines for constructing therapeutic narratives of loss, focusing on the art of storytelling and the four cornerstones of grief stories.
This module describes the structure, language, drafting, and revision of transformative stories of bereavement, drawing on personal, relational and spiritual insights generated through my own practice. These are then communicated practically through guided exercises in which learners will experience the power of therapeutic writing while developing greater mastery of its use in the context of grief. The result is a step-by-step framework for written storytelling that practitioners can use to support the bereaved in processing and healing the pain of tragic loss.
