I Listen to Stories for a Living. And I Never Tire of It.
Stories are everywhere in my life.
Every day, I sit with clients and hear about their worlds. Their worries, their hopes, the thing that happened last Tuesday. The thing that happened thirty years ago that they have never told anyone before. I teach, too, and the people I work with bring their own stories. And then there is my family, with their own daily unfolding.
When I am not doing any of that, I have an audiobook on the go. Walking the dogs, in the car, pottering around the kitchen, gardening or at my allotment. And before I go to sleep at night, I am reading a completely different book. Something to inhabit while the day unwinds. I always have both going at once.
Stories are my lifeblood. They light me up. And being a therapist, I think, is just another word for being someone who has the immense privilege of being let into them.
The Stories We Live Inside
There is a quote I keep coming back to. It is from Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith, spoken by Granny Weatherwax, a witch of formidable wisdom and very little patience for nonsense.
“Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them… you could use them, you could change them.”
— Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
I have thought about that a lot in the context of therapy. Story shapes. I love that phrase. Because it is exactly right. There are patterns, narratives, and recurring themes that we get caught up in without realising it. The story of being not quite good enough. The one about always being the person who is left. The one where we are the one who copes, always, no matter what.
If you let them, they control you. We live inside our stories. And very often, we do not even know we are doing it. But here is the hopeful part of what Granny Weatherwax is saying: if you study them, if you find out about them, you can change them.
That is, more or less, what therapy is for.
Your Script: the Story You Wrote About Yourself
In Transactional Analysis, which is one of the approaches I use, there is a concept called the life script.
The idea, developed by Eric Berne, the founder of TA, is that each of us writes an unconscious story about ourselves very early in life. Based on the messages we receive from the people around us, we make decisions as very small children about who we are, what we deserve, what other people are like, and what we can expect from the world. These decisions become our script. The story we live out, without ever quite realising it.
This script is not something we choose deliberately. It is pieced together from fragments. A throwaway comment that lodged somewhere deep. The times we were praised, and the times we were not. The things that felt safe. The things that did not. A child makes the best sense they can of all of this. And that sense becomes the story they carry into adulthood.
Here is what strikes me: Pratchett was writing about fairy tales and witches, and Berne was writing about pschotherapy, and yet they were pointing at exactly the same thing. Stories have power over us. The ones we absorbed before we could question them most of all.
The good news is that a script can be examined. And once you can see the story you have been living, you have a real choice about whether to keep telling it.
We Don’t Know What Anyone Is Going Through
I think about this whenever I am out in the world.
You pass people in the street, in the supermarket, on the station platform. They look ordinary. They are getting on with things. And you have absolutely no idea what is happening inside them, or inside their lives.
That person you held the door for? They might be in the middle of something devastating. The woman you were impatient with in the queue? She may not have slept properly in months. The man who did not say thank you when you let him out in traffic? Something may have just shattered for him.
We have no way of knowing. And I find that genuinely humbling.
It is one of the things I love most about being a therapist. People come and sit or walk with me, and they let me into their story. Not the polished version they put into the world, but the real one. The complicated, messy, sometimes painful one that does not fit neatly into a conversation over coffee. That trust is something I never take for granted.
What Happens When You Speak Your Story
There is something powerful about saying something out loud. About bringing it into the room and having someone hold it with you, without flinching, without judging, without rushing to fix it.
A lot of the people I work with have never said certain things aloud before. They have carried them alone, turning them over quietly. Not quite sure if they are allowed to feel this. Whether it is too much or too small to mention.
It is not too much. It is never too small.
When you speak your story, something shifts. You are no longer alone with it. And sometimes, hearing your own words out loud, you start to notice things you did not notice before. A pattern. A theme. A version of yourself that deserves a great deal more compassion than you have been giving them.
That is where some of the most important work in therapy happens. Not in being given answers. In being given the space to find your own.
Bring Me Your Story
If you have been thinking about therapy and have not quite got there yet, I want you to know something.
You do not need to have a dramatic story. You do not need to have hit rock bottom or be in crisis. Many of the people I work with are simply carrying something that feels too heavy to keep carrying on their own. Or they have noticed something about themselves that they want to understand. Or they have decided it is time.
Whatever brings you to the door, I am here to listen. I will not judge. I will not rush you. I will not decide in advance what your story means or where it should go.
We will sit with it together. And we will take it from there.
Your story matters. And I genuinely want to hear it.
I offer therapy face-to-face in Wilmslow, online, and outdoors in walking therapy sessions. If you would like to have a chat, you can get in touch here.
