By Dr. Victor S. Sierpina
Tell or write your story to find healing and personal discovery. An evolving field of health care is called narrative medicine. This involves having people use journaling, writing down aspects of their life story, poetry, short stories and other written reflections on what is happening or has happened in their lives.
Such writing can be highly therapeutic. Well-documented studies published in the medical literature show journaling can relieve such conditions as pain, depression and asthmatic symptoms.
For example, Life Story is a healing process in which people write and talk about intense vignettes of their life experiences. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Galveston is one locale where you can learn how to write and share your life story.
I have learned the power of writing down your stories during the years alongside my wife, who used it as a focus for her doctoral dissertation and her work at the OLLI.
Writing your story is helpful to both the writer who connects with his or her history and the listeners who learn of their own deep connection with others through shared stories.
Now here is a surprise association. There is a strong similarity between narrative medicine and country Western music. As a family physician, I have long have had the precious opportunity to listen to the real stories of real people. Telling their stories is often therapeutic to my patients, perhaps better than any remedy I might offer.
Country Western singers have always connected with the deep need of people to tell and hear their unvarnished stories. These life stories are simultaneously truthful, happy, regretful, guilty. They are about painful relations, broken promises, as well as about hope and recovery.
When I was a kid in Phoenix in the ’60s, my friends and I all made fun of country music as too hokey. It couldn’t stand up to the allure of rock n’ roll, or so we thought.
During the years, I have definitely changed my perspective. For example, I really love Willie Nelson’s music. Willie is as Texas as it comes. Michelle and I sat in his bus on a few occasions when he sang to Galveston and have met Willie backstage. More than once I cared for his hard-playing band members who needed acupuncture.
Willie has always impressed me as the penultimate truth teller. He just reports life like it is with his amazing voice, personal integrity, energy and music. His fellow country Western musician artists like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, George Strait, Tammy Wynette, Waylon Jennings and others have the gift of giving us the stories of real people with passion and believability. They have a special gift of engaging us through these stories.
These artists do with music what we hope to do in the healing process. They let the whole story out and then encourage us to deal with it. Release it. Share it. Find someone to help us understand and cope.
Yes, if you want to find some reality and maybe healing in your life, try listening to Willie and other country artists. This can help you feel connected with many of the realities of your life and your story.
If heaven ain’t a lot like Texas (or Dixie), as Hank Williams sang, “Just send me to hell or New York City, it would be about the same to me.” Strong opinion. But that was how he saw the cosmic situation and how he told the story. For those of us who love living in Texas … heck yes, Hank.
Rock on, country music. You help heal us.