Stories That Heal

Since earliest history, storytelling has been the primary vehicle for teaching and for exchanging human knowledge and experience. Here stories become a means of healing, of reparenting, and of conveying to the unconscious mind the peace and comfort of an idealized childhood—often with almost magical effects.

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Stories That Heal addresses adult children of dysfunctional families, who from infancy received distorted messages from their parents, messages that taught: "You are not lovable or important. Don't feel; don't trust yourself or anyone else; don't talk." As children, they incorporated these verbal and nonverbal "teachings" uncritically, since they were taught by their parents.

These teaching tales, told not about the clients themselves but about others "who seem familiar," start with the mother's pregnancy and progress through the developmental stages, always depicting parenting as facilitative and supportive. Hearing these stories while in hypnotic trance, clients experience healthy reparenting, replacing hurtful past experience with loving infancy, childhood, and adolescence. In this way the "adult child" incorporates a new childhood.

The book includes a step-by-step preparation for increasing clients' receptivity to the stories, describing how rapport can be established and trust developed during the initial sessions of hypnotherapy. In addition, the author shares clients' reactions to the stories, showing how reparenting in trance enables them to move beyond anger and self-deprecation to forgiveness and personal growth.

Many people bemoan their unhappy, deprived childhoods—and with good cause. However, as Lee Wallas so poignantly demonstrates, "It's never too late to have a happy childhood!" The "adult child" can experience reparenting and truly "grow up" into happy adulthood.