Challenge:

I practice cognitive psychology and many people sufferings are based on fear. During my work with  them, I follow three main steps and in each of them I use storytelling. The first step is to examine in  what state person is, what are his thoughts and hopes. During this stage I find that very many people  don’t have real contact with themselves, so they struggle with giving me the information what is  needed for successful therapy. In cases when traditional question approach doesn’t work, I use  storytelling, describing similar cases to direct people to understanding of their emotions and then we  work with it. The second step is specifying what people want to get as the result of our work and  what they need it for. Here storytelling is necessary to give them examples of outcomes of similar  cases, of changes in metal and sometimes physical state of the person. This is done to motivate and  direct. In this assignment I am going to focus on those cases when people had phobia, they wanted  to get free of. After the condition of the person, his hopes, motivation, and fears are clarified we  move to the third step: exposure therapy. This is, as I believe, is the brightest example of  storytelling as an efficient tool of working with human mind.

Storytelling is used to create the image as real as its possible, so that person could face it and learn  how to deal with his emotions. Many phobias and fears I worked with are not material (such as fear  of spiders, for example) but instead are abstract, or based on the occasion that already happened.  So, here storytelling, based on the previous experience of the person or on imagination, is the only  way of how to get his mind “into” this scene. To conclude this paragraph: I use storytelling to give  people similar cases so they can understand their emotions better and to motivate them to try the  methods I suggest, after which storytelling is used to make them face their fears.

Application:

One of the brightest examples of how storytelling was used during my practice is the case I had with  a person, who was afraid that her mother will die in several years due to the cancer she had. Even  though she had reasons to have this fear, her feeling of panic and desire to run away from the reality  were not the emotions she wanted to live in. I started with describing a very similar case of how one  of my relatives was dying in the hospital due to cancer and was focusing on such details as sounds,  smells, feelings, and everything that could make this scene as realistic as possible. Her response  was the same as in any other similar case of exposure therapy: she wanted to stop it, run away. This  why the preparation is important, so that people could stick to their desire to get free of their phobias.

According to our agreement I continued, describing how I felt that skin of the dying person is getting  colder, how people cried. At some point her panic stopped, she in some way got used to this scene.  In our next session instead of storytelling the experience I had, I started describing how exactly her  mother is going to die of cancer right in front of her. I used the personal information she shared  about her family to make this scene as realistic as possible, including their looks, smells, reactions  and even though it was hard for us both, we were doing that for almost half an hour. This was  repeated several times and at some point, she started dealing with this fear. Even though her  sadness about the situation hasn’t gotten away, there was no more panic and instead of denying the  reality she accepted it.

Insight & Approach

We had further sessions with her even after she learned of how to work with this fear, we were working  on other issues such as how to find hope and feeling of happiness, but the true change was that she was  free of her panic attacks and the anxiety she had was replaced by the pure sadness, which in her case  was the first step of her way to feel good again. At some of our meetings she told me that her mother  died and even though it was sad, it hadn’t the devastating effect she was afraid of. She was able to take  control over the situation and her emotions.

The two things which I want to mention here is that in both management and psychology two key  factors determine the success of the storytelling: specific details, which make things feel real and

meaningful and relevance of the story you are exploring. Even though my English in this assignment was  far from perfect (I am Russian), I hope that I managed to give the reader of this assignment an  interesting non-traditional example of storytelling usage and the insight, that even though escape and  denying is the natural reaction to phobia, the accepting and dealing with it is the efficient one.

