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Table of Contents
Community Healing through the Laramie Project
What makes art healing?
What makes sharing stories healing?
What makes community and human connection healing?
Community Healing through the Laramie Project
Community Healing through the Laramie Project
The play The Laramie Project was a response to a shared trauma within in the town Laramie in Wyoming, which ended up being healing experience for the whole community. After the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, the small town was thrown into a national spotlight about LGBTQ+ rights. Residents of the town were not used to the attention and were unsure how to process the incident. Moisés Kaufman and nine other members from the Tecttonic Theater Project company then traveled to Laramie to understand why the murder happened and how the town was dealing in the aftermath. As the Tectonic Theater Project website states “It is ok for theater to be controversial. The goal of The Laramie Project is to promote thoughtful discussion and give audiences the opportunity to hear many different points-of-view from those most associated with the murder of Matthew Shepard.” As for the community's response, the play seemed to overall spread awareness about hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community. Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, stated that the play has educated "the participants as well as the audience about what bigotry lies within us all in every community, not just Laramie." The Laramie Project is a clear example of community healing, both within the town and the entire nation, through the art of theater.
Art and Healing
Art and Healing
What makes art healing?
What makes art healing?
Injury and trauma creates an imbalance in your body
In response to stressful or traumatizing situations our body's sympathetic nervous system is activated. When in effect, this system prompts an increase in heart rate, release of epinephrine, bronchial dilation, as well as other functions that prepare the body to react to effectively to danger. Chronic stress is when the sympathetic nervous system continues to be active even after the danger has passed. The body is fooled into thinking it's in a constant state of danger even when it's not.
Parkland School Shooting Survivors
Art: Has proven effective for people suffering from PTSD. It serves as a great starting point before opening up verbally.
Music: Serves to “self-regulate emotions and can form interpersonal connections when playing with others” (Smyth). It's particularly good for children because they aren't as familiar with language.
Drama: Can prove as a safe and playful environment to address serious emotions
Dance: Helps relieve with physical ailments and manifestations of emotional trauma
Therapies
Art therapies are becoming more and more prevalent. According to the American Art Therapy Association, they're used in a wide range of environments including hospitals, schools, veteran's clinics, senior centers, crisis centers, rehab, community clinics. This form of "telling without talking" allows an alternative form of expressing one's pain or trauma that can be more accessible and less stressful than using language. Language, although the most accepted, is only one form of expression and has its own limitations. Due to a lack of research, it is still hard to determine how effective art therapy is on it's own, but it has been proven beneficial for many different groups.
Drumming Therapy for Cancer Patients
What makes sharing stories healing?
What makes sharing stories healing?
Storytelling has been credited to have healing powers from both psychologists and scientists. Articles claim storytelling:
Enables people to take control of their illness/trauma/experiences.
Allows people to fully acknowledge what has happened to them.
Allows people to share their experiences and turn them into lessons: repurpose their experience.
Heals mental wounds.
Is a way to make sense of one's life.
Increases empathy.
Scientifically makes you healthier. (There was an experiment that proved that exchanging stories gives you better blood pressure control: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/healing-through-storytelling/)
Individual Narratives vs Communal Narratives
Individual Narratives vs Communal Narratives
Sharing stories of communities and individuals can both be healing. Interestingly though, stories of individuals sparks more empathy towards one group because you are getting a personal perspective instead of statistics of big numbers of people. One example of sharing an individual story in order to help heal one community is the two part graphic novel called Maus by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman. In Maus, Spiegelman illustrates his fathers experience in the Holocaust and the concentration camp Auschwitz. He famously replaced Jewish characters with mice and Nazi's with cats. Through Spiegelman's storytellling, he has participated in making the memory of the Holocaust more personal than just horrifying pictures and death counts. He was able to retell his father's traumatic events and spread awareness about anti-semetism and it's lasting effects.
Ms. Tamisha on the Powers of Storytelling
Ms. Tamisha on the Powers of Storytelling
(Illustrations below by Ms. Tamisha)
(Illustrations below by Ms. Tamisha)
The Laramie Project became a remedy for healing and awareness for Matthew Shepard’s community. By sharing the narrative of Matthew, his town was able to unify and carry on after the awful hate crime, and the topic of LGBTQ+ rights was brought into the spotlight for the whole country. But how did a play achieve so much? To do further research on the power of storytelling, I conducted an interview with Ms. Tamisha Williams, who is the director of Adult Equity & Inclusion at Lick-Wilmerding High School. I contacted Ms. Tamisha because last semester, she was my teacher for the Storytelling as Empowerment class. In this course, my classmates and I learned about the many different types of storytelling, how to outline an impactful story and why expressing our own narratives to each other is important. Our assignments were creative, reflective and challenging. By the end of the course, my class had united into a small, safe community. Because of Ms. Tamisha’s leadership in this class, I felt that she was the perfect person to talk to about the healing powers of storytelling.
I began my interview by asking Ms. Tamisha about her thoughts on what makes storytelling so powerful. She explained that, “Storytelling is powerful for me because it personalizes a lot of lessons in life. When I think about the lessons that I forgot in high school, it was because I was reading stuff in a textbook and they weren’t personal stories. It was these really kind of curated paragraphs about these “heroes” who I never felt like I could relate to. And then as I started to hear actual stories of those individuals and hear some of the ins and outs of that [textbook] paragraph, it personalized it for me. It made me feel like, oh their actions are do-able.” Ms. Tamisha then told me about the first time she heard about Rosa Parks and how she seemed like this “untouchable hero.” Only when Ms. Tamisha began learning more about the details and context of Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus did she begin to fully understand the story. “It made more sense to me. Social movements made more sense. Her conviction made more sense. I was like wow okay cool this is how something happens. I could work with a community to make change.” Ms. Tamisha’a response was eye-opening because she talked about an aspect of storytelling that I had not covered in my research. Not only does storytelling increase empathy in viewers, but it also inspires them to have similar ambitions because personalizing a hero's narrative is humanizing.
Ms. Tamisha and I also shared a love for graphic novels. She explained how comics were too quick for her and only showed a small segment of a large story. Graphic novels, on the other hand, amazed her because “it was the complete story and it’s the visuals right along with the words and it weaves me through the story.” We agreed that they were the perfect balance of story and images. Some of her favorite graphic novels include: Maus by Art Spiegelman, El Deafo by Cece Bell and March by John Lewis. Maus personalized historical events for her, El Deafo gave her more understanding in the experience of growing up deaf, and March allowed her to connect to the Civil Rights Movement on a deeper level. Ms. Tamisha also remembered that illustrations increase one’s ability to recall information. According to the Insight Resources website, the increase is 29-42%. Because of statistics like this, Ms. Tamisha has been working on visuals for the Distance Learning Program. “It’s a whole lot of paragraphs of words that no one wants to read. But the visuals will tell the story of here’s what we’re going to be doing way more.”
Lastly, I ended with asking Ms. Tamisha about her thoughts on whether storytelling in one’s small community or a global community was more impactful. I asked this in reference to The Laramie Project. Ms. Tamisha thought both were powerful in their own way. She referenced her time at the recent People of Color Conference where one KeyNote speaker named Dr. Joy Degruy talked about her research on post traumatic slave syndrome. She has studied PTSD in people who are descendents of slaves, the trauma that had been passed down, and healing through sharing stories. “What she was saying is that there is power in families saying ‘hey here is what our family went through, here is how we moved through it, here’s what we learned from it.’ Because then as someone who’s a part of that family, I’m healing from that. I sense resilience, I see power in my family.” As for a global scale, she then imagines “those [same] individuals being able to tell that story on a greater platform. Well that’s huge right? Because now if I’m listening to it, I’m resonating with it and I’m thinking about my own family.” Through The Laramie Project and Ms. Tamisha’s examples, it is clear that storytelling can mend both the smallest and largest communities. For the play, that was the town of Laramie and the country. By sharing experiences, individuals can begin to fully process the events that have occured, understand themselves and their community members better, and pass on lessons from a healed place. And by listening to stories, one can broaden their world view, increase their empathy and learn how to make a change themselves.
What makes community and human connection healing?
What makes community and human connection healing?
Overall Themes:
Human connection is a basic human need
Social creatures thrive with interaction
Maslow's hierarchy of needs puts belongingness and love third
Discussing trauma gives the members a space to feel, connect over a shared experience, and have a sense of belonging
Limits loneliness/isolation
Empathy from others
Support and encouragement from others is extremely comforting in times of trauma
People who have shared traumatic experiences come together to find more specific ways to heal
Guidance from others who have gone through something similar
Community and Connection
Community and Connection
Examples:
Alcohol and substance abuse support groups
Supporting environment to discuss the process of rehabilitation
Specific groups for the aboriginal community
There are also support groups for people with mental or physical illnesses
Statistics
"In one study, forty-three survivors of serious injuries reported that social support was one of the three most important factors in their recovery."
"Irish search and recovery divers and survivors of the 2011 Oslo bombing also reported the value of support from friends, family, and leaders in facilitating their post-traumatic recovery.”
Community healing for communities that have experienced colonization
Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange
Group to discuss challenges in the Kalihi community, and bike together
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