Anne Brewster: 'The Healing Power of Storytelling'

This book is about how stories can transform healthcare. Anne Brewster is both a doctor and a patient with multiple sclerosis. Drawing on her personal experiences as well as research from science, the book illustrates the transforming power of storytelling in healing, and provides instructions on how to write and share stories most strongly associated with the improvement of physical and mental health.

Today, more and more medical professionals like Anne Brewster, based on their many years of practice, realize the importance of a sense of control in improving health. The ability to articulate a story and show the meaning of it is one way for us to gain a sense of control and this is powerful. The key is that we are not simply sharing data, but also sharing stories that are written and assigned meaning by us. We are both the main character and the narrator in our own stories, through which we are able to better integrate our illness into your life and form a new identity - “It is through our stories that we find meaning and, ideally, integrate challenging experiences into our identity, so that we can move forward with optimal health. It is in sharing our stories without apology that we come to accept ourselves fully, as we are, without shame. Sharing is vulnerable but also the path to empowerment.” Moreover, telling stories also makes us realize that we are not alone, so it connects and binds us together, not only healing to individuals but healing to the society to combat the epidemic loneliness or isolation.

The idea is that all of us have a story to share, and storytelling is to weave the challenging events into our life’s narratives. They define “illness as any imbalance in physical, psychological, or spiritual well-being and healing as the process of moving toward balance and wholeness”, which is quite close to the definition of illness in Traditional Chinese Medicine. We all know life challenges and traumas could also be opportunities for personal growth through our responses to these challenges and traumas, and according to Anne Brewster, storytelling or meaning making is central to this process. The quote from Rabih Alameddine tells it clearly - “What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.“ At the same time, it is found that what people really want when confronting challenges is to hear stories of others who face similar challenges. These stories that tell the truth about the struggles but also highlight hope and possibility will give people hope and diminish their sufferings simply by feeling that they are not alone.

Anne Brewster sees a gap to fill in the current healthcare system, which simply does not provide the space for patients to share their stories. As a doctor and also a patient who needs to confront the life changing illness herself, Anne Brewster admits that her experience as a patient shifted her role as a doctor: “And as a doctor, my goals had shifted. I no longer considered it my job to ‘fix’ my patients, but rather to serve as a partner in care, as two equal beings. I learned that the best I can do for patients is to listen well, with reverence, to make them feel they matter, with less judgment. I understood that I had medical knowledge to impart, but my assessments of what is ‘right’ became much more nuanced and complex. I had learned that the patient ultimately knows best.” Her efforts and experience to incorporate storytelling into the existing health care system vividly show how challenging it is to make changes in healthcare due to the layers of bureaucracy. She started her experiment outside of the healthcare system, and when she tried to work back into the healthcare system, she encountered numerous blocks: “for the most part, my proposal stirred up skepticism, fear, and resistance. ‘What about patient privacy and HIPAA? Litigation? Patient safety?’ I was asked. The system felt impenetrable and entrenched, and the risk-management mentality seemed to overshadow the potential positives of the project.” Reading here and considering the fact that she is a doctor and is working in the healthcare system, and still found these challenges insurmountable, I can only admire my own fearlessness, or ignorance, in trying to work on a proposal to carry out research in the NHS.

Besides her own personal experiences, Anne Brewster turns to the work of Jonathan Adler and others to provide science to further ground and guide storytelling for healthcare. From philosophy and cognitive science, storytelling is essential to human existence and survival - “Spiders spin webs; beavers build dams; humans tell stories.” Essentially, humans make sense of the world and make sense of ourselves via storytelling. Adle’s research on the notion of narrative identity tells us that the stories we tell about ourselves shape the deepest sense of self. Anne Brewster put it this way, “Stories make us human.” In recent years, there has been more and more evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and neurobiology to demonstrate the power of storytelling. For instance, research shows that we will remember facts better when they are presented in narrative forms, rather than list formats. More research shows that listening to stories could change our attitudes, behavior, and health measurements, so is the value of being heard. By measuring cell telomere length, a marker of biological stress resilience, Adler and colleagues show that “the ability to integrate stressful life events into one’s identity through storytelling is linked to psychological and biological stress resilience over time.”

Anne Brewster is also a founder of Health Story Collaborative, a website to collect, honor and share stories of illness and healing, and together with Adler created the “Healing Story Sessions” program. In this book, she shares step by step instructions of how to craft stories for us to move towards “integration, wholeness, and enhanced well-being. ” For instance, it provide story prompts for people to talk about before and after the diagnosis of the disease, focusing on rich details and different scenes, as well as the hardest and potentially high point experienced along the way, and also how to help revise the stories to turn them into empowering and therapeutic narratives, by helping identify and develop themes “that are known to promote health, namely coherence, agency, communion, redemption, and accommodative processing.”

Overall, I quite enjoy reading this book about storytelling in health. If we want to enhance people’s agency in shaping their own health and life, it seems storytelling could play an important role here.