Choice and Consequence: The Truths We Avoid and the Responsibility We Carry | Branch Isole

So my next question is that while your work includes stories about emotions and experienced people, recognizing, recognized thoughts we may not always experience, what can, what can storytelling reveal about people that direct advice or moralizing sometimes cannot do?

Well, great question.

You know, since the, since we gathered together around the fire in caves thousands of years ago, stories, that is sharing of experiences, uh, this, this is the original storytelling, right? Teaching others, teaching our children how to survive in the world.

So when you read a story, you're reading about a situation that someone has experienced or some issue or some problem in their life.

And so what stories do is they allow us to identify the things that we're struggling with in our own life, in our own relationships- How somebody else dealt with it, right? So every story has a theme, every story has a moral, every story has a lesson, and every story has the reward or, or how, you know, what we learn from the lesson.

So stories relate to us because stories explain to us situations that other people or other characters have gone through and how they got through it, how they got to the end, how they saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

And so when we read a story, there's certain things in the story that we can identify with, and this is...

So stories teach us how other people have dealt with problems and issues, and if we have those same problems and issues, it gives us ideas or pathways or avenues that we might also use to solve our problem or our issue.

Because we can relate to not only the situation, but we can relate to the characters, we can relate to the emotions, and we can relate to the plot, and that's the power of storytelling.

Storytelling can keep playing in your head, so you can always use it as a reference, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

It, it becomes a reference for the unknown, right? If I'm dealing with a situation in my relationship at home or work, all I know is what I learned as a child, you see? This is the...

This is what happens when we have personal relationship problems.

As an adult, what I learned how to handle an issue or a problem with the people in my life is whatever I witnessed as a child, however the adults in my life handled those problems or those issues.

So that's what I saw as my model, so more than likely, that's what I use as an adult.

The problem with that is if I never learned what the steps of correcting the problem were, then the problem just continues to repeat itself.

You know, if I say or do something that's inappropriate to my partner, to my teenager, to my coworker, whoever it may be, and it causes an issue, because I don't know the steps of repair, my first instinct is to say, "I'm sorry.

Please forgive me.

Can't we move on?" But the problem is, unless I know what the steps are for relationship repair, I don't know what that next moving on step looks like.

And if I don't know the steps, then the issue comes up again, the problem comes up again, and the, the other person and I just keep repeating the same behavior.

And if there's never any resolution, if there's never any true repair that's done, then the relationship can't grow.

It can't get any better.

It can't, you know, manifest itself as something new.

And this is why people in relationships, either at home or at work, repeat over and over and over the same issues and problems because they don't know what the next step is after I say, "Can't we just move on?"

Thank you for that beautiful answer.