Why Stories Change the Brain: Narrative Integration After Inner Journeys
It’s easy to think of stories as simple sources of entertainment, external things that happen outside of us when we hear them from one person or tell them to another. The truth about stories, though, is that they play a more intimate role in our lives than we realize. Even when we’re not aware of it, our brains are constantly making sense of our complicated, sometimes confusing experience through narrative.
In other words, stories are the way we make sense of the world around us. When we go through change, navigate grief, or deal with any one of the transitory experiences life might offer us, we use narrative to integrate those experiences into our lives and help them become a part of who we are.
In more ways than one, story is among the most powerful tools we have.
The Brain Is a Meaning-Making Organ
Day after day, whether you’re eating a quiet meal or navigating the freeway on your way to work, your brain is trying to answer three important questions:
What is happening?
What does it mean?
What should I do next?
These questions might come from our brain’s highly evolved sense of survivalism—they were put in place to help our ancestors avoid getting turned into food or falling into crevasses—but if you think about it…they’re directly rooted in narrative work. Experience isn’t always easy to categorize, so your brain works—quietly and in the background, a lot of the time—to thread it into something coherent. To turn it, in other words, into a story that makes sense to you.
During an inner journey, this process becomes a lot more flexible. Patterns of thought that are typically more rigid become looser. Your ability to interpret the world in different ways grows even stronger, prompting you to consider new possibilities and previously unexplored avenues of thought.
In scientific terms, it might sound a little bit more complicated—your brain’s neuroplasticity is increased, and autobiographical processing is altered—but in everyday language, the outcome is relatively simple: You can see your life and yourself differently.
Why Altered States Make Space for New Stories
To an increasing degree, people have been finding that, through psychedelic-assisted therapy—which can include anything from breathwork and symbolic meditation to ketamine-assisted therapeutic journeys—we tend to discover the ability to peacefully reconsider stories we might have long accepted as fact. The brain makes space for new stories and opens windows in the psyche, through which new truths can emerge.
Sometimes it even feels less like learning something new and more like remembering something you already knew to be true.
Example #1: “I’m the strong one. I don’t get to fall apart.”
You might not be singing these exact words to yourself as you wake up every morning…but if the general sentiment of the above statement feels familiar to you, you’re certainly not alone. Many people carry this kind of mindset with them throughout life, and it’s an inner statement that can be incredibly powerful, even when unspoken. It can be tough to feel any other way when you’re always the one holding everything together. So what happens during an inner journey?
Well, the brain gets the chance to entertain a new story about you. Perhaps a new sentence emerges: “I can allow myself to be held, too.”
As we integrate this experience into our own personal narratives, this might translate into something that we can live and embody in a practical sense: “I’m allowed to be a receiver sometimes, too. I don’t have to do everything by myself. I can’t take care of everyone if I don’t take care of myself.”
This new story becomes a narrative pathway that you can now follow, walking yourself into more satisfying areas of experience. The ones you’ve chosen.
Example #2: “My life is shrinking.”
We’ve all been there. It’s easy to feel like the walls are closing in, especially if you go through a particularly anxiety-inducing experience, like grieving, going through a breakup, becoming an empty nester, and so forth. It can be all too easy to start telling yourself that your life is getting smaller, or to feel as though you’re in the process of losing pieces of yourself.
During an inner journey, though, perspective becomes an incredibly powerful, restorative tool. You may find yourself able to see, now, that you’re actually in a period of growth! Change! Transformation! Your experience starts to feel less like a collapse and more like an opportunity for something new.
You might find it easier to tell yourself something along the lines of, “I’m in a season of new becoming. My life isn’t shrinking; it’s reshaping itself and becoming something beautiful in its newness.”
It’s not reality that has changed. What’s changed is the story you’re now telling yourself.
What Integration Actually Looks Like
When we come out on the other side of an inner journey, integration becomes an important part of the process, helping us turn the symbolic aspects of these experiences into something concrete and liveable. Something we can integrate into our personal lives.
In a lot of ways, integration gives us the opportunity to reconsider and adjust beliefs that have been limiting us or holding us back without our realizing it. Before integration, a woman grieving her late husband might feel as though her joy is a betrayal of his memory. After integration, though, she might come to the realization that her joy doesn’t leave her husband behind. Rather, it brings him with her in the ways he would have wanted.
The quiet power of integration lies in its ability to turn limiting beliefs into permission. To turn walls into windows. To make new space for rewarding experiences, that you might become the steward of your own happiness and fulfillment.
Story as Ceremony: Starting a New Chapter
To me, the most interesting thing about all of this is that none of it is new. Since we’ve been able to walk and talk, humans have been utilizing storytelling to share information, teach each other how to survive, and generally make sense of the world around us when it’s at its strangest.
On an individual level, integrating your experience into a meaningful personal narrative helps you become someone who can actually live the things you saw. We call this “integration” because it literally involves the process of integrating your new experiences into the established narrative of yourself and your life, exploring the new perspectives and new truths that present themselves as you do so.
The story, in a way, becomes the doorway, open and waiting and inviting you to explore new experiences, new possibilities, and new beginnings. All you need to do is walk through it.
