Ep 1: Reframing the crisis

We live with and within crises. We tell stories of crises, and in crises, to make sense of what is happening around us. While crises alienate, stories connect. As scarce resources lead to a withdrawal into the individual, stories bring us back into the collective. Even as crises create a false sense of competition, making different groups battle for the limited opportunities, stories foster a sense of community, bringing us together to see how the problems that we face are shared and collective.

Narrative Change shifts the relationship between stories and crises. Instead of telling stories of crises, we invite you to think of stories as re-framing the crises. How do we tell stories so that they are not just examples or illustrations, but invitations to imagine and build the world where the crisis has shifted? How do we refuse the dominant story of the crisis and produce more humane, embodied, and emotional understanding of the situation?

Alexandra Juhasz and Diana Ocholla help us reframe the crisis by looking at the entanglements of body, crisis, empathy, and empowerment. Each section in this episode is a prompt to rethink our position within crises and how we can use stories to reframe them.

Section 1: What does it mean to embody a crisis?

Section 1 begins with you. Before we begin talking about what is around us, we need to find an anchor point in our own bodies, and learn to speak from there. Diana helps us register the crisis, not as something that is out there, but something that is experienced in our bodies. It is a soft awakening of the body and introducing the idea of extending our bodies to the stories of others.

In this embodiment exercise, we learned how the specificity of our body leads to look at the beliefs and the perspectives of the others. The question we want to think more about is how this extension towards other people’s story, affect my own perception of the crisis?

Section 2: The voices of many

Section 2 recognises that bodies and stories are interlinked. Our stories shape our bodies. Our bodies inform our stories. But the strong link also means that it becomes difficult, especially in times of crises, to listen to the voices of the other – the other body, the other person, the other perspective. The next section is an attempt to de-centre our own personal story in order to make space for the stories and voices of the others.

In this reflective video, we are particularly focusing on the role of empathy, voices, and the space for active listening and being heard. The section pays attention to how and why we need to amplify the voices repressed by larger systems. In the process, it shows us how, a crisis doesn’t just have multiple bodies, but multiple stories, and while the stories might seem disconnected, we have to find ways of sharing our stories as embodying the same crisis in different ways.

Section 3: Extending your story

The third section is an invitation to let your story go – and in the letting go, watching it grow. During crises, we retreat and withdraw into ourselves, and often hold on to our stories, not realising that they are shared and collective. In this interactive section, you will explore how we can reclaim power and agency by extending our stories to others.

Stories are powerful and personal. We often hold on to them because they are precious and we are scared of losing control or others appropriating them. However, stories are meant for sharing – not just to be told, but to be created as a collective. In this exercise, you are invited to share and extend your story and reflect on the process of exchange and reciprocity that shifts the narrative of the crisis, as we let our stories go and grow.

Section 4: Sympathetic Narratives

In crises, our stories are often presented as competing for resources, attention, and care. Multiple groups and people who might all be experiencing the crises differently, are asked to produce their stories as a way of claiming their presence and voice in a condition of scarcity. They are told that only one of the stories can be true or can be supported. Narrative Change proposes that we need to engage with the idea of Sympathetic Narratives – stories that connect rather than compete.

In this video, exploring both vulnerability and empathy, we are guided into exploring how the act of sharing can be a powerful force of forming meaningful connections, of tapping into feelings and perspectives other than our own, and to understand that the crisis is being experienced together. Narrative change gives an orientation to our stories to connect and co-exist with communities that might seem distant or disconnected from us, thus producing new conditions of care. 

Section 5: Shifting Perspectives

The last section of this episode on Reframing Crises reminds us, that stories morph, change, grow, mutate, adapt, and live in different ways. When we tell stories, they are not etched in stone, but are living organisms that connect with others. When a story is told, it changes the perspective of the one who listens as well as the one who tells it. Narrative Change orientation recognises stories as relationships, and invites you to explore what happens when perspectives shift, move, and make themselves heard.

In this hands-on exercise, you are invited to think about the voice of the ‘ other’  and how it resonates with your own. It shows how we can reorient ourselves to the crisis, by identifying common structures of power rather than ‘ othering’  people who are also affected by the crisis. It invites us to expand and orient ways in which we frame our crisis in order to find liberating and empowering modes of moving with and through trauma. The exercise wraps up this episode by showing how stories are a way of making connections in order to claim collective agency and hope.

#reframingthecrisis #empathy #empowerment #doingthingswithstories