How Stories Transform Fear & The Science Behind It
Photo by Annie Spratt on UnSplash
As parents, we all encounter a child’s fear from time to time, often from a scary story or movie. My seven year old daughter and I recently listened to “La Llorona”, a scary legend with Latin American roots. I realized it was too much for her about halfway through, at which point I turned it off. But I wished I had caught it earlier. Afterward she was scared to go to bed and we had a terrible night of sleep.
On one hand, I’m an idiot. But as a storyteller, I’d like to share how that fearful experience gave us an incredible insight into how fear works in the body - and how to resolve it. On the simplest level, this is an article about how storytelling soothes a child’s mind, but for me the larger message is about how storytelling empowers children (and adults) to take control over their own psychology.
“La Llorona”, or the weeper, is an old myth with many versions, not unlike one of Grimm’s fairytales or the banshees in Ireland. The particular story my daughter and I listened to was told by Joe Hayes, an incredible bilingual storyteller here in New Mexico who brought the tale to life with expert pauses and painful expressions. As the protagonist sank low, so did our hearts.
In the story, a beautiful and self-centered woman named Maria is jilted by her husband. Having given up on Maria, the husband, in a mean-spirited act, drives his carriage by their house with another woman seated beside him. He smiles and says hello to his children, but doesn’t even look at Maria, his wife. Then he slaps the reins and passes by. In a fit of jealousy, Maria throws her children into the river because he looks at them, not her. Not exactly a good marriage. Hearing her children’s cries, Maria comes to her senses, but as she runs to save them, she trips, hits her head on a rock, and dies.
I know. I’m a terrible father. Why I thought my seven-year-old would enjoy this story is beyond me, but at this point we finally stopped. My daughter stared blankly at the wall. At school, she’ll play ghosts and zombies with her friends, but this story really shook her. She couldn’t understand why a mother would throw her own children into a river. Why would anyone tell a story that nasty? How could her own father think this was appropriate? The psychological shock was formidable.
I apologized and tried to comfort her, but that didn’t take the story away. It stayed with her long into the night, and the next day.
For me, it’s helpful to define what began to occupy my daughter’s thoughts as a meme. Nowadays, we use that word to describe catchy phrases and images on social media, but the original meaning of the term is any mental object that exists, for better or worse, true or untrue, in the consciousness of a human being. We could call it a thought, but a meme has the sense of a life of its own.
As humans live and die, certain mental constructions have a notable and lasting presence – the concept of freedom, the idea of ghosts, the golden rule, heaven and hell, etc. Whether true or not, and sometimes even in spite of apparent falsity, these ideas persist from one mind to another, generation after generation. Ultimately, they have a very real impact on human behavior. Because of their tenacity, some theoreticians have described these mental constructions as having a life of their own, infecting minds much the same way a virus infects our sinuses. This is a meme.
All children face scary thoughts from time to time. It’s part of being human. As adults with fully formed executive brain function, we’re largely able to keep these scary thoughts at a distance. Children are not. The meme of “La Llorona”, the weeping mother who kills her own children – a story that never was true – had infected my daughter, and it was causing real pain to both of us.
We got through the following day just fine, but as the sun went down that evening my daughter began to express her fears over sleeping alone. Her mother and I brainstormed with her over the kitchen table, taking the obvious routes – it’s just a story, we love you, think happy thoughts, etc. But even I didn’t believe the words coming from my mouth.
Alone in the dark, who can think away a scary thought? I mean a real scare, not a titillating thriller. As adults, we’ve largely relegated the boogieman to the basement, but who doesn’t lie awake from time to time worrying about their job, their child’s safety, or their relationship? I still worry a slimy octopus arm is going to catch my ankle just before I reach the top stair at night. These aren’t things that can be un-thought, rationalized, or fought off with a good punch.
On a whim, I offered to finish the story with my daughter. After all I’m a storyteller, right? “I’ll retell the story,” I said, “but this time with a happy ending.” My daughter looked at me with hesitation. I was the one who had gotten us into this mess. Why would we revisit that dreadful story?
At first it was just an idea – I was just brainstorming – but as I listened to myself, I sensed that I had struck something solid. That solid something can be described in the language of modern brain science. The word is plasticity. “Here’s the thing,” I said, “you can’t NOT think scary thoughts. It just doesn’t work. It’s like trying to not think of an elephant when someone says not to think of an elephant. The brain can’t do it.”
Why can’t the brain do it? The concept of brain plasticity is elegantly laid out in Dr. Norman Doidge’s bestseller The Brain That Changes Itself. In it, he describes two fundamental principles of neuroscience – 1) neurons that fire together wire together, and 2) use it or lose it. In other words, neurons that repeatedly fire together get strengthened – making them more likely to fire again in the future. Conversely, “use it or lose it” means the connections that rarely get sparked eventually get replaced by more useful connections.
What this reveals about the structure of the brain – and the mental constructions (memes) that ride on top of it – is that the brain is a constantly evolving organ. Our thoughts shape the physical structure of our brain, and the physical structure of our brain shapes our thoughts. What this meant for my daughter, in constantly recycling the fear brought up by the story of “La Llorona”, is that she had created a well-worn path in her brain, making it all the more likely that her thoughts – particularly when left alone in the dark – would once again follow that well-established pattern.
This is why you can’t un-think something. In not-thinking it, one is prone to retracing the well-worn paths we’ve already established in the mind. We can picture it as the path of water over a smooth surface of mud. If the mud is undisturbed, the water will first spread out over the surface like a swamp, till it slowly finds the lower spots, links them together, and forms a tiny channel of running water. More and more of the water (brain activity) will be directed into this little groove until the channel gets eroded deeper into the surface of the mud, making a proper riverbed. At this point, if nothing else is done, it becomes very hard for the water (brain activity) to “jump the banks” and find a new route.
For much of my life, I thought the way to deal with fear was to avoid it – meaning dam up the river and stop the water (brain activity). This might be called un-thinking, or un-learning. I thought healthy distractions would give me other things to think about, other rivers in my mind to explore. We now know that doesn’t work. Unhealthy thoughts – whatever they are – repeat themselves, and particularly in the dark of night when few distractions are available.
My recent experience with “La Llorona” convinced me that a better way was to go right into the riverbed – the hotbed of neural activity – and redirect the fear into a new and safe harbor. This takes advantage of the deep groove already worn in place and redirects it – through the power of storytelling – into a healthy outcome.
That evening before bed we sat down to one of the best stories of our lives. I gently recapitulated where the story had left off – two children tumbling down the river, and a mother dead on the ground. That’s a hell of a place to start, but I had strong motivation – my daughter’s sense of security and her mental health. Plus, I wanted to sleep that night.
I went for the children first. I wanted them to be safe. Earlier, my daughter had asked whether they had seen their mother die, so I said that they had turned a corner in the river. They hadn’t actually seen her die. This seemed to soothe her, if lightly.
As the kids were shouting for help, they bumped into a raft. My daughter stared at me with skepticism, but she was listening. The children yelled and tried to pull themselves on board, but the the raft appeared to be empty. Finally, a tiny red hat peaked over the edge followed by a long gray beard. It was a gnome, a familiar and comforting image to my daughter, who smiled for a second as he quickly ducked back into the raft. “Help!” the children shouted. A rope tumbled over the side.
The children safe for the moment, I went back for mom. I found her spirit floating by the river, where she had been blessed with that lucky insight of death. She saw everything clearly now, exactly as it had been all along, her faults, her strengths, her responsibility. With new resolve, she floated down the river to see if she could find her children and tell them she was sorry.
From here, the story became long and circuitous. I knew it would take a story equally as compelling as the original to compete with its powerful message, so I pulled out all the big guns – humor, mystery, friendship, vivid colors and experiences, a long journey, etc. By the end, the spirit-mother, two children, and a roving band of friendly forest gnomes, had journeyed from the river into the mountains in search of a wise wizard who lived in a cave only visible in the light of the full moon.
The story took more than an hour. Eventually, the family returned to a deep pool of water they had encountered along the way – it had turned one of the children’s fingertips gold – and began to lower the symbol of their integrity (a perfect apple) into the pool just as the full moon began to dip below the horizon. As the apple became gold, the girl with the golden fingertip realized that this pool of water was itself the wizard’s cave. “Hurry,” she said, “the moon is almost gone. We must jump into the water!”
With only a moment to say goodbye to the forest elves, the children jumped into the pool, and their spirit-mother, Maria, followed. Deep inside, the children believed, they would find the old wizard. But as soon as their eyes dipped below the water, they were surrounded by dazzling colors and magical waters.
“We must take a bite,” said the girl, “we must all take a bite.” That, she realized, was the key to finding the wizard. They could see nothing, but as they passed the apple from hand to hand by feel, each child took a bite. Finally Maria, the spirit-mother, took a bite and was surprised to feel the apple with real teeth. She tasted it with real lips and tongue.
Suddenly, she was back in her old house. The kids were asleep in their beds. Before she could make sense of what had happened, she heard the clip-clop-clip of horse’s hooves and went to the door. Her husband was driving up with a beautiful woman at his side. The kids woke at the sound and came out to see their father, who ignored Maria just as before, waved at the kids, and drove off haughtily.
But Maria had been transformed. She saw right through her husband. She saw through herself, and into the hearts of her children, and smiled. She wondered if it had all been a dream, but as they walked back inside – there on the table was the golden apple, with three bites taken from its flesh. The sun was shining and her daughter’s fingertip was gleaming.
I’m not suggesting this is a great story. I’m suggesting that it was a fine story made great by the transformation that took place within my daughter and I. At the tale’s end, having twisted its logic in many different directions and taken its characters down many different paths, my daughter had a new mental landscape to explore any time her mind drifted back to that first awful story. She had paths that led directly from a fearful place to islands of wonder, safety, and even humor. She even had reason to doubt the original fear-inducing scene. She slept peacefully that night (today, as I revise this, it’s a year later - the story has never come up again).
When we hear the word storytelling, most of us think of the story, or narrative. I’d like to invite you to see it as a relationship, a tool for creating intimacy and shared cognition. This isn’t pseudoscience. It’s exactly what researchers and neuroscientists are studying today.
What my daughter and I accomplished that night was not the creation of a new and remarkable narrative. I’m not that good of a storyteller. No, what we accomplished that night was an expression of our love and care for one another, and I promise you that you are just as good at it. Storytelling is a skill we inherited from our ancestors. It has been honed by thousands of years of evolution, and it works stunningly well in modern contexts. Like walking, all it takes is practice.
As parents, we often seek stories for our kids in books and videos made by world-renowned authors and animators. This is wonderful, but if we do not also claim the tradition of storytelling for ourselves, then we have put down one of the most powerful tools in our human toolbox. It would be like trying to get from one room to another while refusing to walk. You were born to walk. You were born to tell stories.
In the example of “La Llorona”, you can imagine what might have happened if I went in search of a book, video, or some other story to cheer my daughter up. I might have found variations on this ancient story, but each would have ended in similar horror. I could also have found some different stories, nicer stories, but in the end these would probably have only distracted her, as would apple pie or homework. Alone in a dark room at night, the story that had gripped her imagination, that meme that found its host environment, would have inevitably crept back in. That’s what humans do. That’s how our brains work.
The next day, after a night of good sleep, my daughter and I chatted over breakfast about the new story we had created. We considered telling more stories, one about the father (that jerk could use a little help), or just another adventure through the forest. She particularly liked a slimy snail named Petunia, who carried the elves’ luggage and slimed everyone in a playful manner from time to time. There were many new paths to follow, many new doors to open, and that deep groove of fear led directly to all of them. This is something no one could have done for us. We had to bushwhack through the jungle of fear on our own to create the healthy circuits that were now firing in my daughter’s cheerful brain.
But I was happy about something else too. In transforming this story together, she gained some perspective on how a story – a meme, if you will – gains hold on a person’s thoughts. She’s only seven, but I believe these kinds of experiences will help her recognize at age twenty-seven some of the stories that she is telling herself then. I’m too fat, too tall, too dumb, etc. She may be able to isolate one or two of them, stories that are perhaps causing her unnecessary pain, and use her own storytelling skills to transform (not erase) them into something beautiful. I like to think she will step right into that river, take a bite of the golden apple, and catch the sun gleaming off her fingertip.
Our blog The Storytelling Loop has been read by over 60,000 people across the world. In it, we share tips, research, and examples of how to connect with kids through storytelling. It is a joint project of Silke Rose West and Joseph Sarosy, authors of How to Tell Stories to Children.