When stories shape you...
...for good or for evil
Recently I had a conversation with some friends regarding one of my favorite topics: stories and how they shape us. It started out as a time of sharing different anecdotes of books we’d read (or, in some cases, films we had seen) as children and teens that truly traumatized us, and still affect us now as adults. The reminiscences brought some laughter, but at the same time, were somewhat sobering.
As someone who has battled OCD since being a young child, I am very well-acquainted with how a mind can latch onto different stories and situations and obsess about them. When I was young, it was E.T. and I would cower in my little rocking chair in my room, terrified that aliens would break through the ceiling and do who knows what to me and my family. When I was a young teen, it was the idea of the Bubonic Plague, and I lived for years in every day terror that the plague would come again, and my family and I would suffer at its hands. The overwhelming fear colored literally everything. As a young adult, the crazy wife in Jane Eyre haunted my dreams, and I had to talk myself away from quite a few mental cliffs when my new husband and I spent several nights of our British honeymoon in the attic apartments of an old English manor house.
I recognize that not everyone has this mental illness, and that my mind obsesses about disturbing stories and ideas to a much higher degree than most, but this conversation with my friends made me realize that this phenomenon happens more often than I originally thought. Sometimes it can be a child’s mind latching onto some aspect of a seemingly innocuous tale, and other times it can happen when, as teens or adults, we’re confronted by stories that contain details that traumatize.
The latter situation is one that I know can be sticky. Every day, countless people in the world walk through real-life horrific situations that most of us couldn’t even imagine. I’ve heard many an argument saying that by consuming detailed stories of abuse and terrible situations, that we’re acknowledging that the world isn’t a bed of roses and daisies. That reading stories of extreme and horrible dysfunction makes us more empathetic to those going through hard things in life.
I can understand where those arguments are coming from. As someone who grates against toxic positivity and who is passionate about living the tension of beauty in a fallen world, I’m all for making sure that the stories we focus on aren’t giving us a false idea of reality. I also never want to minimize another’s pain, as I well know the salt in the wound that happens when someone does that to you.
But I sometimes wonder if reading stories of horrific situations can actually end up numbing us to real pain when we are confronted by it in another person. If the repeated gratuitous details floating around in our brains end up desensitizing us to how bad things really are when someone shares their real-life situation.
When I am confronted by someone else’s pain, I want to be struck by the enormity of it so that I can truly come alongside them however they need. Every person’s pain is unique and should be given its full due, but will I really be able to do that if my reaction is along the lines of “Oh yeah, I read about that in a book last year”?
It is a tension though as various studies have shown that reading fiction does increase your empathy, and anyone who reads a lot of fiction would probably be able show examples of that in their personal experience. Where to draw the line in your own life as an adult will be different for every person, but it’s something we each need to be intentional about. The watchwords of goodness, truth, and beauty are not trite and weak, but full of strength and depth, and when we allow them to dictate the stories that surround us, the dividends are rich.
And nowhere is that more important than the stories that shape our children. The situations that I was referencing in the above paragraphs have more to do with what we read as adults, but as many of the anecdotes that my friends and I shared with each other highlighted, quite a few of the stories around us as children follow us the rest of our lives.
In a way, it all comes back to how we view the years before adulthood. I think the sometimes cliche analogy of gardening is especially apropos in this area. We live above 7000 feet in elevation in the Rocky Mountains, and gardening here is somewhat complicated. Other than the quick-growing herbs, I plant almost everything in my little backyard garden from starts, but I can’t just stick them in the ground as soon I get them. I have to keep them in my house for several weeks after I get them, bringing them outside only once it gets above a certain temperature and if I know the wind isn’t too bad. (I once had the wind snap one of my tomato plants in half!) This process is called “hardening off”, and it’s slow and tedious. Once we’re pretty sure that it’s not going to get below freezing anymore (usually the end of May…yes, really!), I can finally plant my precious little starts outside. But even then I can’t just let them be: I have to be very intentional to make sure they don’t get dried out by the intense wind and high-elevation sunshine. And should we get a freak snowstorm or below-freezing night in the early summer, I have to cover them with random blankets and old quilts.
To me, this process is a very apt picture of parenting. It’s not one of sheltering children completely until they’re 18 and then leaving them completely unprepared to face the adult world (something I’ve seen happen over and over, and it never ends well!), but neither is it one of just putting them out into the world at a young age and leaving them to fend for themselves emotionally. The latter approach is always cited as “preparing them for real life as an adult”, but the flaw in that idea is that children’s brains are not adult brains and therefore aren’t developmentally able to handle “real-life” situations like adults. Forcing children to try to do so before they are developmentally able to (i.e. once their brains have finished growing in their early 20s) can often lead to trauma that affects them the rest of their lives.
One thing our amazing therapist has brought up repeatedly is that the beliefs we are taught as children and young adults are often the hardest to shake as it’s something we’re being told as our brains are literally forming. Those are called “the formative years” for a reason! Those beliefs and ideas obviously most often come from those around us, but they also are a result of the stories we read.
Are the stories we give our children shaping them for good, or are they only adding the emotional burden of life? The “hardening off” approach in parenting can be challenging, especially in this area, but it’s one that I’ve already seen reap great rewards and my oldest is only fifteen! As a young child, we sheltered him from a lot of the hardest parts of life in the stories he heard (something that I realize not every parent can do for their child due to circumstances outside of their control, and my heart truly goes out to families in those challenging positions), and gave him stories that helped to strengthen his mental, emotional, and spiritual roots as they were growing. We continued to give him stories full of truth, goodness, and beauty as he grew, while allowing more details of hardships as we saw he was ready for them (the timing of which differs with every child). As a teen, he’s now aware of much of the hard parts of the world, but his emotional foundation is strong so he’s able to handle it well. And those stories that helped shape him are ones he still returns to, and we’re continuing to add to that treasure trove.
The morning after the lovely discussion with my friends that prompted these ramblings, I opened my phone and discovered that one of my favorite authors, Sarah Clarkson, will be hosting an online event at the beginning of August, all about “Creating a Story-Formed Home”. Sarah’s now-out-of-print book, Caught Up in a Story: Fostering a Storyformed Life of Great Books & Imagination with Your Children, is one of my favorites and has bolstered and encouraged me in this area that forms a huge part of my parenting. This event is apparently based off that book, along with her other out-of-print book on the subject, Read for the Heart: Whole Books for WholeHearted Families, and I’m sure it will be excellent! I’ll definitely be joining.
May the stories we read and give to others be ones that build us up, and remind us that even in this broken world, in the end, Love and Beauty will win.
“Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.” (Philippians 4:8)