"Making sense includes creating a coherent narrative of one’s own life."
Daniel Seigel, The Mindful Therapist
Based on attachment research, Dan Siegel explains that you’re very likely to pass your adaptations from a difficult childhood on to your children, if you don’t take the time and find the opportunities to make sense out of what has felt senseless.
All creative work challenges limiting stories. And the artistic process itself facilitates an opening to other stories. It corrects or at least alters the original distortions, shifting the horizon lines. Life feels more purposeful. It’s a radically different story if you experience yourself as victim in a tragic universe versus a purposeful actor in a world of Beauty (connection) and Truth (authenticity).
Though what we gain from this Work is difficult to put into language, and it does not fit into a simple principle, often in the end we’re left with a window into a new way of living. There may be a sense of redemption that restores our relationship with ourselves and with others or with life A debt that we never really owed may have been cleared from our slate.
Shame (I’m bad) is exchanged for a recovery of what our Heart truly came into the world to know (I have the capacity to be lovable, loving, and intentional).
In the best outcome of this Work, the Tragic myth has been deconstructed to the point that we are no longer experiencing ourselves as a stranger in a strange land.