Stories, Brain Science, and the Transformation of Fear
As parents, we all encounter a child’s fear from time to time - often from a scary story or a movie. It’s a terrible feeling, right? It’s one thing to deal with your own fear, but seeing it erupt in your child can make you feel powerless.
In this episode, Joseph Sarosy draws upon the work of neuroscientists to explain how a well-placed story can ease and even transform fear. Not erase it. Not distract from it. But how a story helps us look fear right in the face, and change it.
Scroll Down For Transcript
Photo by Caleb Woods via Unsplash
About This Podcast
From the authors of How to Tell Stories to Children comes a podcast that supports parents, teachers, and grandparents who want to engage in the intimacy and excitement of storytelling at home.
Our work has been endorsed by Dr. Jane Goodall, New York Times bestselling authors and parenting guides Steve Biddulph, Kim John Payne, Bill McKibben, Richard Rohr, Charles Eisenstein, and many more.
Warning! This is not a collection of children's stories (you can find those here). It's about empowerment. It is about finding your voice. We combine the science of storytelling with a step-by-step method, practice exercises, and sample stories to help you awaken to the storyteller within.
Transcript
Stories, Brain Science, and the Transformation of Fear
copyright 2021
As parents, we all encounter a child’s fear from time to time, often from a scary story or a movie. It’s a terrible feeling, right? It’s one thing to deal with your own fear, but seeing it erupt in your child. You can feel powerless.
In this episode, I’d like to explain how a story, well-placed, can ease and even transform fear. Not erase it. Not distract from it. But how a story helps us look it right in the face, and transform it.
My seven year old daughter and I recently listened to “La Llorona”, a scary legend with Latin American roots. Roughly translated, it means “The Wailer” or “Weeper,” and it’s a prominent story in New Mexico where we live. 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.
Maybe you’ve encountered a situation like this.
On one hand, let’s be straight – I’m an idiot. But as a storyteller, I’d like to share how that fearful experience gave us both an insight into how fear works in the body. On the simplest level, this is 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 our own psychology.
But first, you have to follow me down. A deep hole. Of despair.
“La Llorona”, or the weeper, is an old myth with many versions, not unlike one of Grimm’s fairytales or the concept of banshees in Ireland. The particular story my daughter and I listened to was told by Joe Hayes, a 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 but self-centered woman named Maria is jilted by her husband. Having given up on Maria entirely, the man, in a mean-spirited act, drives his carriage by the house with another woman seated beside him. He smiles and says hello to his children, but doesn’t even look at his wife, Maria. Then he slaps the reins and passes by. It’s as if she’s not there. 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.
Before we go any further, let’s all admit that I’m a terrible father. Why I thought my seven-year-old would enjoy this story is beyond me, but at this point in the narration 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 took it seriously, and 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. In the story, Maria goes on to be a sort of undead spirit who cries and wails for her lost children, but my daughter caught wind of something even more terrifying – the very concept of a hateful and untrustworthy mother.
I tried to comfort her. I apologized. But as we all know, that didn’t take the story away. She loved me, and she loved her mother, but now she had a new and terrifying thought buried into her skull. It stayed with her long into the night, and the next day. We hardly slept. You’ve probably been there.
For me, it’s helpful to define what had begun to occupy my daughter’s mind 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.
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. Whether true or not, and sometimes even in spite of apparent falseness, these ideas persist from one mind to another, generation after generation. Ultimately, they have a very real impact on human behavior, sometimes a very profound one. So, even if they are fake or untrue, they can be understood to have a real presence, a real consequence. As parents, we see this in our children all the time – a nontrue idea having a very important impact in our child’s life. Because of their tenacity, some people even describe these memes, these mental ideas, as having a life of their own, infecting minds much the same way a virus infects bodies.
All children face scary thoughts from time to time. It’s part of being a human. As adults with fully formed executive brain function, we’re largely able to keep these scary thoughts at a distance. Children are not. They have a much harder time differentiating between the factual and the fantastical. This is a beautiful quality, but it can also cause our children, and ourselves, a lot of unnecessary pain. In my daughter’s case, the meme of “La Llorona”, the idea of a weeping mother who kills her own children – had infiltrated her mind. It had infected my daughter, and even though it was not true, it was causing real pain to both of us.
After a night without much sleep, we got through the following day just fine. I hoped we had moved through the worst of it, but as the sun went down my daughter began to express fears about 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 an exciting 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 real fears – their job, their child’s safety, or their relationship? Personally, 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. They live with us.
But suddenly, 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. After all, 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 immediately sensed that I had struck something solid. That solid something can be described in the language of brain science. The word is plasticity. “Here’s the thing,” I said, “you can’t NOT think scary thoughts. It 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 neural 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 together again in the future. Conversely, the connections that rarely get sparked eventually get cleaned out and replaced by more useful connections.
Another way to say this is that the more commonly you have to remember something, the more entrenched it is in your mind. The less frequently you pull up a memory, the more likely you will forget it, or forget some of it, over time. Neural plasticity explains the real and physical process by which this happens.
What this reveals about the structure of the brain – and the mental images (or memes) that ride on top of it – is that the brain is a constantly evolving organ. It’s not stationary. Our thoughts shape the physical structure of our brain, and the physical structure of our brain shapes our thoughts. It is a dynamic process that proceeds throughout our entire lives.
So here’s what was happening to my daughter. In constantly recycling the fear and the images brought up by the story of “La Llorona”, she had begun to create a well-worn neural network in her brain, making it all the more likely that her thoughts – particularly when left alone in the dark – would once again fall into that pattern.
Perhaps you’ve experienced this before, a cycling of negative thoughts that seems to entrench itself in your mental life.
This is why you can’t un-think something. In not-thinking, one has to retrace the well-worn paths and habits that we’ve already established. Negation requires us to think something, to revisit it. The “not” only comes after the fact, as a sort of extra-cognitive layer. Adults, with fully formed executive function, are reasonably competent at this. Children are not.
Think of it as the path of water over a smooth surface of soft mud. If the mud is undisturbed, the water will first spread out over the entire surface like a swamp. But slowly it will find the lower elevations, link them together, and form a tiny channel. As more water is introduced, more and more of it will be directed into this little groove, further eroding the channel, and creating a deeper depression in the surface of the mud. Eventually, it makes a proper riverbed, and any water (or brain activity) introduced to this environment will tend to fall within its banks. If nothing else is done, it becomes very hard for the water 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. Stop the brain activity. I thought healthy distractions would give me other things to think about, other rivers to explore. We now know that doesn’t work. Unhealthy thoughts – whatever they are – will 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 to face fear is to go right into the riverbed – the hotbed of neural activity – and redirect it into a new and safe harbor. This takes advantage of the deep groove already worn in place in the mind, and redirects it – through the power of storytelling – into a healthy outcome. It’s like non-invasive brain surgery.
That evening before bed, my daughter and I 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 now 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 raft. My daughter stared at me with skepticism, but she was listening. The children yelled and tried to pull themselves on board, but there was no one inside. 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, and 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 suddenly 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.
I won’t recount the entire story here. From here, it grew 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, the two children, and a roving band of friendly forest elves, had journeyed from the river into the mountains in search of a wise wizard who lived in a cave visible only by the light of the full moon.
The story took over an hour. Eventually, the family returned to a deep pool of water they had encountered along the way – earlier, it had turned one of the children’s fingertips gold. Just as the full moon began to dip below the horizon, they began to lower the symbol of their integrity (a perfect apple collected from a secret orchard) into the pool of water. As the apple turned gold, and the girl with the golden fingertip realized that this itself was the 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 Maria (the mother) 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 of the apple,” said the girl, “we must all take a bite.” That, she realized, was the key to finding the wizard. They could see nothing of each other, but as they passed the apple from hand to hand, by feeling, 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. It was exactly the same scene as the beginning of the story. The man ignored Maria just as before 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.
Now, 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 to that awful story. She had paths – real physical paths in her mind – 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. Had it all been a dream? She slept peacefully that night.
When we hear the word storytelling, most of us think of the story. We think of the narrative. I invite you to see storytelling as a relationship, a mental and social tool. What my daughter and I accomplished that night was not the creation of a new and remarkable narrative – it was an expression of our love for one another. Please don’t be misled by the story I told. It may sound like I’m a good storyteller, but I promise you that you are just as good. This is a skill that each of us inherited from our ancestors. And like any skill, practice will make you skillful. I was able to tell that story with my daughter only because we had spent years telling dozens, probably hundreds, beforehand – most of which were simple and even laughably bad.
As parents, we often seek stories for our kids from books and videos made by world-renowned authors and animators. I want to be 100% clear that I support that. Books and movies are awesome, right? My goal is simply to help us awaken to the fact that the tradition of storytelling is also something that lives directly within ourselves. Within each one of us. If we don’t use it, we are putting aside one of the most powerful tools in our parenting toolbox. And it’s not just parents and children. Storytelling is one of the primary ways we make sense of the world, share information, and build trust and intimacy. It is about the relationship, not the narrative. Not telling stories is like trying to get from one room to another without walking. We were born to move by walking. We were born to make meaning by sharing stories.
In the example of “La Llorona”, you can imagine what might have happened if I went in search of a story to cheer my daughter up. I might have found variations on this ancient myth, but each would have ended in similar horror. I could also have found some different stories, happier stories, and they may have distracted her for a while. But in the end, alone in a dark room at night, the story that had gripped her imagination would inevitably creep back in. That’s how brains work. It’s how memes work.
Instead, after a night of good sleep, my daughter and I chatted over breakfast about the new story we had created together. We considered telling new stories, one about the father (boy, that guy needed some help), or just another adventure through the forest. She particularly liked a slimy snail named Petunia, who had carried the elves’ luggage and slimed everyone in a playful manner from time to time. There were so many 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 do it ourselves. We had to bushwhack through the jungle of fear – look it right in the face – in order to create the healthy circuits that were now firing in my daughter’s cheerful brain.
I’m actually recounting all this a year and a half later. My daughter just turned 9. And guess what – this story has never come up again. Not once. She has not had one restless night of sleep since then, at least not due to this story. If you take away nothing else – take away this: if your child has encountered some fearful story or idea, do not turn away from it. Finish the story. Give them a story, a path in their mind, that leads directly from fear to safety and love.
Okay, one last thing. Because after telling this story, I was happy about something else too. In transforming this story together, my daughter also gained some perspective on everything I’m sharing today – how a story (a meme, if you will) can gain hold of her thoughts. She’s only 9, but I believe these kinds of experiences – reiterated over time – will help her recognize at age twenty-nine some of the stories that she is telling herself then. I’m too overweight, too lazy, too dumb, etc. Have you ever told yourself some of these stories? With practice, I think 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 – but transform) them into something beautiful. I like to think that she will step right into that river, take a bite of the golden apple, and catch the sun gleaming off her fingertip.