How It Works by Daniel MacIvor, March 13-22, 2014 at the Registry Theatre

Is telling your story the best medicine?

Daniel MacIvor’s play How It Works suggests that telling our stories can lead to healing.  In it, 19 year old Brooke, the drug-addicted daughter of divorced parents Al and Donna, is encouraged by Al’s new girlfriend, Christine, to tell her story.  Christine is convinced that Brooke’s healing will begin if she shares her secret.  But is it really that “easy”?

Lissa Rankin, M.D., writes in the November 27, 2012 issue of Psychology Today:

Every time you tell your story and someone else who cares bears witness to it, you turn off the body’s stress responses, flipping off toxic stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine and flipping on relaxation responses that release healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, and endorphins. Not only does this turn on the body’s innate self-repair mechanisms and function as preventative medicine—or treatment if you’re sick. It also relaxes your nervous system and helps heal your mind of depression, anxiety, fear, anger, and feelings of disconnection.

Keeping secrets can be toxic.  Dr. James Pennebaker, a professor in the Dept of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that people who have powerful secrets are more prone to health problems.  So – would their health improve if they shared those secrets?  His research strongly suggests that the answer is yes. In his study of college students who wrote expressively about traumatic experiences, participants visited the doctor for illness half as often as the control group.  Further studies showed that expressive writing can help lower blood pressure, enhance immune function, and reduce symptoms of asthma and arthritis.  Watch a 3 minute video of Dr. Pennebaker here.

Art imitates life? 
At the top of the play, Christine tells the audience:

As far as I can figure, the way that it works is this: everyone has something that happened to them. The thing that we each carry... The thing that keeps you up at night, or makes you not trust people, or stops love. The thing that hurts. And to stop it, to stop the hurt you have to turn it into a story. And not just a story you play over and over for yourself, but a story that you tell. A story's not a story unless you tell it. And once you tell it, it’s not yours anymore. You give it away. And once you give it away it's not something that hurts you anymore, it's something that helps everyone who hears it.

Photo: Heather Brezden as the troubled Brooke