On what it means to receive the same story – for the teller and for me
By Dr. Abby Jorgensen
When I’m working with a family who is experiencing or has experienced a loss, I often will spend time listening to them as they tell me important parts of their story. Sometimes, it’s the first time they’ve ever told anyone the story. Sometimes, the story details what happened that morning, and sometimes, it’s a history from decades ago that has remained hidden for far too long.
One common pattern I see is that sometimes, a person who is struggling to make sense of a particular moment or interaction will repeat that story over and over again. Sometimes I’ve counted as many as five or six retellings, in the same conversation, of exactly the same story. The person often doesn’t realize that they’re going back over the same conversational ground. Sometimes there are different inflections in the story, different elements that appear. But the plotline and major characters are the same.
Sometimes the story is one of sadness (the moment a child took their last breath). Sometimes the story is one of naive joy (the moment she discovered that the pregnancy test was positive and thought everything would be alright). Sometimes the story is one of deep anger (the moment a provider uncompassionately shared the news that the fetus had died).
And the story comes spilling out, and does again, and then another time.
Believe it or not, this conversation pattern is very normal. This isn’t even something I worry about, so long as the person seems to be safe and capable of keeping those around them safe. Often times, when they’ve told me the story two or three times, I’ll even invite it the next time they mention that moment — “Could you tell me about that again? That moment seems so impactful for you.”
Some people might experience listening to this retelling as boring, tiresome, or burdensome. And there is some truth to this — what I think the person is often longing for is a way for the story to end appropriately, for the plotline to finish in a place that makes sense. I can’t give them that. It’s hard to be reminded, over and over and over again, that you can’t actually solve the crushing problem the person is telling you about. It’s grating to keep hearing a message that you’ll never be able to fix a thing you keep hearing about, no matter what you do. Taking on that burden, again, and again, and again, and again, is a sacrifice of mental stimulation in conversation in honor of helping a person carrying the heavy burden that moment places upon them.
So, listening to the story allows us to help the other person feel less alone. But also, it can give someone the chance to share their child with another person — the child whose public image may never have materialized, who may remain unknown to most of the community. And even further, through listening and attending to the nuanced differences, I can validate different emotions that may arise as someone walks back through the story with slightly different foci each time.
But most of all, listening to this story is an ever-expanding gift.
Each time you listen to that story, you give an even larger gift of hearing someone who has not been heard, of receiving something the giver does not yet understand. This is why I call listening to the same story over and over again the “ever-expanding gift.” I deeply believe that creating a conversational space for the release of the story and the emotions behind it, bit by little tiny bit, becomes more impactful the more we do it for that particular story.
Support people of many kinds are entrusted with stories. While our conversational norms might lead us to expect that we will hear a story once (maybe twice, if the teller has forgotten they’ve already shared it with us), in reality grief stories can be replayed and reiterated and reshared. Next time you are the recipient of these stories, I hope you can identify yourself as the giver of an ever-expanding gift with each iteration of the story you receive, hold, and cherish.
