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Episode 44: Healing Through Storytelling

If you’re interested in memoir, here’s another great episode of the podcast that follows an emerging theme we have going right now focused on the power of sharing our stories. In this week’s episode, Elizabeth talks with Lenore about how her need for healing, after experiencing a myriad of health symptoms, encouraged her to create a podcast dedicated to sharing her story about being a survivor of a true crime. But, it was ultimately through the process of writing her stories that she found healing. When mental and physical illness started to take hold of her life, Lenore met with a psychologist who shared with her the impact PTSD can have on your life. If you’ve experienced any trauma, you may be familiar with the toll it can take on your well-being. Lenore started to use writing as a therapeutic tool, much like our guest, Cheydrea, from last week’s episode, and it became her most important strategy for managing the intensity of her emotions. The healing was not overnight. It took Lenore years and years to work through the trauma she experienced. We often start to layer our trauma and because of how our culture functions, we keep moving forward without looking back. However, the compounding effect of this can be detrimental to your health, and that’s what Lenore started to see in her own life. While we all have different experiences, we can learn so much from each other’s stories. There’s a common understanding about the journey of overcoming experiences and processing the feelings that can be relatable. When you know you’re not alone there’s so much healing that happens and your story can help someone else navigate their life.

I think that's why the power of telling our stories, no matter the details of the trauma or the hardship that we went through, it's the process of overcoming and the feelings and the um, coping mechanisms that are very relatable and that's, I think, knowing that we're not alone in those, that's how we get through and I think that's what's really powerful about memoir. - Lenore

Lenore’s own podcast was her approach to recording her experience as a way to get her ideas out so she can eventually write her book. Her focus was on the power of the survivor and the qualities all human beings share for survival. Often the focus in true crime is on the perpetrator because of our fascination with criminal minds as a culture, but what about the survivor?

While Lenore was working with the psychologist and remembering her experiences, writing allowed her to have some emotional detachment from her experience. She discovered her strength was through writing her stories which allowed her to get it out of her and onto paper, and she found her voice through the creation of her podcast. If you think you can’t remember something, start writing about it and you’d be amazed at what you can remember.

I think that's, you know, that's the power in, in a good story told a way that, um, really allows the reader to, to find, um, their own journey because, I mean, that's the point. -Lenore

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