WHAT IS STORY WORK?
Story work is a guided process of engaging written narratives of harm to help us understand our lives with greater clarity and embrace the fullness of who God created us to be.
Story work is a guided process of engaging written narratives of harm to help us understand our lives with greater clarity and embrace the fullness of who God created us to be.
Story work invites you to write a 600–1000 word story from your childhood (ages 4–18) about an experience that marked you through its pain. This might be a major event, like the loss of a parent, or something that seemed small at the time, like a passing comment about your body. Even seemingly minor moments can symbolize deeper wounds or represent larger patterns that have shaped how you see yourself and your place in the world.
Because truth sets us free, story work is about seeing your life with greater honesty. Freedom becomes possible when we name—specifically and truthfully—how we have been harmed and how we have caused harm. Story work invites us to tell the truth about both the heartbreak and the goodness in our stories. We can reclaim only what we are willing to name.
During a story work session, you will read your story aloud. Together, we will enter the particularities of your experience so you can feel the emotions of your story in the presence of others who offer attunement, containment, and care. This does not change the past, but it does change how you understand and carry it. As clarity grows, so does freedom. We are shaped not by what happened to us, but by what we came to believe about what happened.
Story work allows you to no longer face these moments alone. Being “felt and known” in the presence of another brings healing. In this shared space, we experience the possibility of redemption and resurrection as we explore how your story fits within the gospel of the kingdom of God. In all its brokenness and beauty, your story reveals God.
Unlike many books, bible studies, conferences, and even much of counseling, story work is not focused on information transfer or behavior modification. Instead, it goes to the root—back to the moments where the beliefs that shape our behavior today were formed. We cannot change our past, but we can change how it shapes our present and future—and we can offer care to the places where we were wounded. This is the hope of story work. Story work invites us to courageously enter our past heartache, and in doing so, we often find ourselves in the very place where healing and restoration occur.
Naming the depth of our pain requires real courage. Most of us minimize our heartache as we retell our stories in safer ways. We generalize, suppress painful details, gloss over inconsistencies, skip what we cannot bear, sanitize the story, or make jokes to pretend the past no longer affects us. We forgive and forget too quickly, offer easy phrases like “but God is good,” and arrange our heroes and villains in ways that keep our world undisturbed. Few are willing to enter this tender territory with us, to ask for clarity or invite us to grieve. But when we bypass pain and grief, we also bypass the fullness of the healing God offers and we become stuck.
Many of us rush to forgive too quickly. True forgiveness does not avoid the painful depths of our stories. When we use forgiveness to bypass heartache, it becomes a form of cheap grace. Instead, we must allow the stories of our childhood to surface one by one, offering grace, care, and healing to the wounded child within. We are meant to receive the care of heaven and confront the darkness of hell in our own lives, families, and world.
Returning to the particularities of our painful stories is an act of profound courage. It requires seeing our story as God sees it. As we embrace the truth held deep within us, we open our hearts to remember, to grieve, and to invite God to meet our heartache with tenderness. Our task is simply to tell the truth and allow our pain to be engaged. Story work is a slow and gentle movement—a lifelong process. It may take time to see and tell the truth about your story, but you are worth the time it takes.
While healing and freedom are worthy desires, they are not the ultimate goal. Your healing is meant to launch you into the world as the person God created you to be. But you cannot know your identity or purpose without understanding your story. God takes what evil intended for harm and brings forth goodness, beauty, and authority in you for the sake of His kingdom. Engaging your story is a gift you give yourself. Sharing your story becomes a gift to others—offering a glimpse of what it means to be human, revealing the struggles we all share, and inviting deeper relationship. Healing is for you, but it is also for those around you. We are freed from our past for the sake of our future.
We study our stories because we believe that by learning from the past, we can create a richer future. We return to painful narratives trusting that even our tragedies hold something life‑giving. We risk reopening old wounds because we believe they can become places of strength. While God may not answer all our questions—and some stories may remain unredeemed until heaven—His primary invitation is into relationship, not explanation. If God is truly good beyond our imagining and able to transform evil into good, then the redemption of our life’s tragedies will be nothing short of glorious. We may not see that redemption in this lifetime, but then again, God may choose to redeem them even now.
© True Story Coaching │ Tori Swenson