Why telling your personal life story is effective self reflection

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There is no one whose story I am as familiar with as much as my own and the same is true for you. This seems so obvious, but then what surprises me a little is how I see my own story differently almost every time I tell it.

“The most powerful words in the English language are tell me a story.” -Pat Conroy

Connections that seemed so important the first time that I told my own story seemed less important over time. Coincidences and perspective have become clearer over time. When I see those changes the story changes as I retell it and I find that it changes me. I become different because of how I see the story differently. It seems like we continually create who we are but use the same events to shape our own conclusions. 

Victor Yocco, in his article Dwelling On The Past: The Importance Of Self Reflection, said `personal reflection enables us to process and make meaning of our experiences. Everyone stands to gain from engaging in some type of reflection.

I have witnessed how other people seem to change their own conclusions about themselves using the same facts from participating in an event at my local church.

Over a period of about 35 years a men's group I participated in met once a month and each time one person would take about 45 minutes and tell the group their life story. 

The initial purpose in doing this was to help us get to know each other. We believed that men didn't bond all that easy and they normally were a little shy in a setting like this.  We felt it was important to gain an appreciation and even a love for each other.

People moved in and moved away over this time but somehow we were able to keep this going. After a few years it lead to recycling some of us by repeating our story and we would hear the life stories again. I do have some memory issues, but I usually can remember the details of these type of stories clearly. What was interesting is that sometimes the events of a story heard before clearly was viewed differently by the presenter when re told. I had my own occasions of retelling my life experiences that I felt important and it was clear to me that the same events looked different in retelling. There were times when I wondered if a person who seemed to see the same event differently when retold, was doing so because having told the story he then found different new connections to the events. I also wondered if the changes and different emphasis was on purpose just reshaping an image?

People do come and go in our lives and it takes some time to see reasons. When a new person comes we take the influence and new perspective for granted as coincidence. When we look back and see the full impact of the people and new events in our lives we see our own experiences differently and as a result the past looks different and our expected destiny feels changed by the events.

Julie Beck, Senior Editor at the Atlantic wrote a story for the Atlantic in 2016 titled “Coincidences and the Meaning of Life“. A quote used in the article, “A coincidence is in the eye of the beholder.” Her article studies the impact of coincidence suggesting such things as Carl Jung’s theory of “synchronicity”* as potential reasons for these event in our life but it seems clear that when we consider our own life stories that our own experiences and even those coincidences that caused us to consider a different viewpoint do change us and we became a new persons reinvented by our own introspection.

• Links to Julie Beck, Senior Editor at the Atlantic wrote a story for the Atlantic in 2016 titled “Coincidences and the Meaning of Life“.

• Link to Victor Yocco’s article, Dwelling On The Past: The Importance Of Self Reflection, in Smashing Magazine 2018

• Synchronicity is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection."

Memory Quilts connect us with our past →

The memory of my Mother’s Cedar Chest goes back as far as I can remember. It was always referred to as a Cedar Chest not a Hope Chest and the things she kept in were various items that she wanted to remember.

The chest contained memories of her 57 years of marriage, but I really didn’t pay any attention to what was in the chest until several years after I was married and had moved away. Inside she had put old clothes, shirts, baby clothes, drapery, ties, doilies, some jewelry and even some flowers pressed between cardboard. Most of the clothing were things I had worn growing up, rather than my younger brother and sister, suggesting she didn’t stay as focused on this collection as the years went by.

I didn’t really understand what a Memory Quilt was when I decided to take most of the cloth items and have the cut into pieces that could be sowed together. An older neighbor and good friend, Ann Reese was experienced in making quilts and the process of sewing many small pieces of fabric together to create a design for a quilt top. I took the patchwork top to my Sister in Law, Anna Marie, and she did the quilting sewing together of the three layers that make up a quilt - the top, the central wadding, and the backing.

Things that are nostalgic often are connected to missing someone or something and they evoke powerful memories because we absorbed the emotions of the event that they items are connect too. We carry the feelings of the emotion with us and each time we look at certain items we find those feelings.

The finished quilt brings back many memories and is its own piece of Family History. Being able to remember many of original items the quilt speaks to me.

The best life story sometimes doesn’t speak words.