“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” (a quote often attributed to writer Anais Nin) succinctly describes the idea that our individual interpretations of the world deeply shape our realities. In modern psychotherapy, we often refer to these interpretive filters as “lenses” and highlight the impact they have on…
Tag: storytelling
Healthcare is Human: Creative Responses to COVID-19 from Martinsburg, West Virginia
(Photo above: Molly Humphries) It’s not a stretch to say that we are all still grappling with COVID. From a biomedical standpoint, though we have ways of staving off and managing the disease, we are still seeing daily deaths in numbers high enough for there to be ongoing concerns. New strains proliferate through countries even…
Why We Tell Stories
Nitya Rajeshuni // “Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one…
Little House in the Hood: Save the Bees, call me Mel
Cover Image: Self-Portrait by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2020. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // What’s in a Name? I was born in the 1980s, an era filled with excess. Perhaps this is the reason I have always struggled with moderation. My generation was defined by drugs, MTV, and Melissas. From grade school to high school, I was one of a few…
Cuento Therapy, Storytelling, and Men Who Abuse Women
Chuka Nestor Emezue // In 1985, Dr. Giuseppe Costantino and his colleagues, Drs. Robert G. Malgady, and Lloyd Henry Rogler, drafted their popular paperback: “Cuento Therapy: folktales as a culturally sensitive psychotherapy for Puerto Rican children.” Their work positioned ‘Cuento Therapy,’ as a hopeful form of narrative therapy in the field of child psychotherapy and…
Comedy Conflicted: The Dual Nature of Humor in “The House of God”
James Belarde // “Comedy is a tool of togetherness. It’s a way of putting your arm around someone, pointing at something, and saying, ‘Isn’t it funny that we do that?’ It’s a way of reaching out.” -Kate McKinnon In 1978, Samuel Shem published The House of God, a scandalous novel centered around the lives of…