Dr Kathryn Mannix1
1Palliative Care Physician and Cognitive Behavioural Therapist
Abstract:
For generations, humans in all cultures have use storytelling to convey enormous ideas like love, truth, trust and betrayal, rupture and repair, birth and death. In palliative care, we meet patients who are reviewing their lives and making sense of their life-story. Their self-understanding can play a big part in the way they tolerate or suffer from their symptoms. Self-understanding allows people to look at, rather than become stuck inside, their distress. This applies to the people we serve, as we help them to explore and understand their distress, and it applies to us as we bring ourselves alongside them as companions, recognising and validating their distress without mistaking it as our own.
Observing people facing the end of their lives with relative equanimity, especially when we have started to understand the difficulties they have faced during their lifetime, can offer us some insights about the way we meet and live with our own difficulties. What can storytelling offer us as practitioners? And what can we learn from the stories we are privileged to hear?