Catharsis is What Connects Us

I didn’t sense I needed a cathartic moment after planning my mother’s burial, writing her obituary, organizing the memorial, creating, and then delivering the eulogy. When I came down from the pulpit, I only knew I needed to rest. I got such a strong sense of fulfillment from my process and act of storytelling, but there was no catharsis. That began when we invited friends and family to share their own memories of my mom; I just listened.

Listening was the core cathartic moment facing my own grief. That is when I realized my purpose of authoring the obituary and eulogy was to invite, maybe compel the audience to contribute and participate in telling the larger story of her life. Their stories didn’t represent the conclusion of her life. They were a key turning point to her on-going conversational story, to continue to live in our own lives. A community of story.

Creating her “Story Social” was uplifting and a time for us to escape from our sadness. Those who spoke contributed to her life’s fabric of reality (see Article 1 ). The reality we spun that day was in part bonding, through our interweaving stories that was the tapestry of remembrance. This reinvigorated story was to became an ongoing conversation, helping us stay bonded as a community while keeping current the meaning of Constance’s life.

What if we hadn’t paused for the audience to participate? Each attendee’s memories would have been wrapped up in their own melancholy; the emotions pained in their unfulfilled expression.?

Authors empower full engagement, full immersion in the story experience, by leaving gaps that invite the audience to participate in personal authorship to experience, cathartic agency. That is where stories become a social fellowship.

To stimulate the conversation, I created a collection of artifacts from her life to hold and share, to bring a touchstone of reality to our family pictures. There was one photo of my mom as a child posing with her baby doll and brother. We found that very antique doll in storage; her facial expression matched my mom’s as a toddler in the photo. The younger version of mom was looking out to us with curiosity, asking, “what’s in store for my life?” The combination of photo and doll? was the portal for us to see through her eyes to share the story conversation about her life that we witnessed.

To be and stay healthy, every community should find ways to periodically conduct these Story Socials, taping the lives of those who lived before us. It’s in our genes; it’s the way community transmits, endures, and learns. Think of all the life stories now untold in our families and communities that lie under gravestones in lonely cemeteries.? We have a precious opportunity to grow as a community, to search, revive and share these memories of lost stories and forgotten dreams—not to study history, but to strengthen the story. We need that story to provide the supportive emotional framework, to bring the facts and figures of our history into our larger cultural legacy. But that takes social engagement.?

Stories allow us to feel the emotion and learn without the pain of the past. However, when telling these stories, we can’t expect audiences to suppress their own emotions into their subconscious. We can hope the audience to process those secondary feelings through participation, the expression after and during listening. Our social conversation can stimulate emotions and process catharsis, resulting in more intrinsic meaning. It both emerges from and underlies a wider spectrum of our emotional and cultural life.

Can we talk about it??

My mother was just one life, one death, but her thread runs through an interconnected remembrance tapestry touching so many lives. Each of those lives connects to others we don't even know. Our family history is part of the larger story tapestry of our community. It’s a bridge to the larger emotional framework of humanity, a way to hold together during the hard times.

A doll artifact is a common thread of humanity where we could see through a child’s eyes.? Artifacts are the physical touchstones to ignite our imagination, to see the past through other’s eyes. Think of the many little girls around the world whose same moment was captured by their parents. Yet in their stories wildly differ from my mom's depression-era, 1930s Boston neighborhood.

My mother’s life was just one life. What if we needed to process the stories from millions of lives dying? Every life contains gems of insight, but together too overwhelming to consume, much less comprehend. What Western culture currently has provided supportive social connection that we can rebuild if we attend to personal participation in each community’s story? It’s difficult to initiate, but rewarding, healing—and there’s so much need.

Are Stories and Artifacts Enough to Share our Heritage?

The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida asked this after seeing a demo of MemoryScapes, our immersive story research. They hoped to collaborate with us for new ways to engage the community through stories and artifacts.?

In the curator's words, “We don’t want a Hollywood story that ties everything up with a neat little bow of closure. Our story is an open wound that should spark a conversation that goes home with visitors to reflect on these times in their own lives.”?

They asked us to spark conversations about the Holocaust’s relevance and weave that into their community story tapestry. This was a challenge in story as well as experience design: Weaving visitors’ own stories into the continuous arc of our humanity.

Stories and Artifacts were not enough.

MemoryScapes were eXtended Reality story environments that converged all the creative media conventions of literature, theater, cinema and museums, into a themed detailed, physical living room of 1930s Romania. Our story began with ghosts, but the museum saw a new way this physical story environment supported and respected the reflective moments the audience needed. The open, themed space, an artifact, transported them, revealing poignant, evocative details. The artifacts, in a Mixed Reality experience, could? animate with Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) and simple audio/visual projection mapping to reveal and spark far deeper conversations through time.?

For 8th graders, the traumatic story of the Holocaust was less about how the tragedy ended, and more about how it started with small civil actions. An early action and artifact was tagging the Jewish family’s belongings with swastikas to claim them for the Nazi State, to intimidate, deny wealth and legitimacy under the Jewish Laws.?

Our question was, “how much do we need to spare children from these historic tragedies?” But, the reality was that children were swept up into the whole experience of the Holocaust. The underlying question was, “what is the ethical responsibility of the storyteller potentially triggering intergenerational secondary social trauma that comes with representing raw atrocities of history??

OK, then what better way to represent to a child than through the words of a child? Yes, in the company of their parents, to discuss and process the turn of events. We had? hundreds of diaries of children of the holocaust to draw from. We put their written thoughts into spoken words with hypersonic sound, to transfer the protagonists’ voices into the heads of participants to establish presence and immediacy. ?

Broadly, do we try to face tragedy or soften it? How do we transport and transform via the story of the Holocaust without transferring the social trauma to the present, personally? Such questions apply to the atrocities of slavery as well. Both subjects are in the state’s educational standards.?

Ironically, we’re talking about a state that outlaws making people feel bad about history. It makes our role in story creation for learning, reconciliation and healing much more complicated. Legally, now, the only way to measure and regulate this emotional journey is in real-time dialogue with humans. The best person for this would be your parent, the most important teacher of your lifetime. The family conversation can be more important than the historic story, mediated and supported by the community learning center.

It can be argued that the worst atrocities of American History go beyond physical, emotional and social abuse. There is the atrocity of how we have institutionally misrepresented the narrative, oversimplifying history. We’ve reinforced prejudice into a fairytale format. That was an effort to make a privileged class feel good about their ancestor's mistakes. The true hero’s journey was with the everyday protagonist who had hope and self-determination in the face of overwhelming odds. These ordinary heroes were our relatives; their lessons are more intrinsic and lasting for us than any cinematic epic.?

Stories can transport and transform you into historically significant lessons. We can paint the drama without triggering the trauma. To answer the difficult questions we need to do less storytelling and more story listening.?

The Story Social, includes everyone participating as an author, actor and audience, taking turns moving the narrative of the community along. Conversational story interjects the expressive and empathetic imagination so we can revisit the past, make history relevant to the present, then reimagine the future, together. The reality of story is best conveyed through real dialogue.

Making and continuing the community’s stories of our history from many perspectives of the community is indispensable to build rich resilience and cohesion.

The next article will discusses how creating MemoryScapes can eXtend Reality (XR) into our collective imagination of humanity.

Copyright (c)2024 Christopher Stapleton

Thanks to Clark Dodsworth for editorial collaboration.

Acknowledgment to Dana Mott, creative director of MemoryScapes