Hidden Brain - The Story of Your Life

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

We can’t go back and change the past. We can’t erase trauma and hardship. But what if there was a way to regain control of our personal narratives? In the second part of our series on storytelling, we look at how interpreting the stories of our lives — and rewriting them — can change us forever. Also, a note that this week's episode touches on themes of trauma and suicide. If you or someone you know may be having thoughts of suicide, please call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Greek mythology is filled with stories of violence, anger, and hatred. Take the tale of the goddess Medea. To distract her father as she fled with her lover, Medea killed her brother, cut up his body, and scattered the pieces behind her. Then there's the god Kronos, who devoured five of his children at birth to ward off a prophecy that one of them would eventually overthrow him. For a land blessed with exceptional sunshine and good wine, Greece's home to a striking number of tales about incest, brutality, and bloodthirsty revenge.

Thousands of years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle had a theory of why this was. In poetics, he suggested that the goal of art was something he called, catharsis. Writing, watching, and reenacting tragedy was good for the soul. It was a form of healing. The idea that stories can be a form of therapy has carried over into modern times. Sigmund Freud explored the idea.

Psychoanalysis involves understanding the self as a series of stories. After Freud fell out of favor, researchers and counselors have continued to explore the role that stories play in our mental wellbeing. This week on Hidden Brain, how understanding the stories of our lives and rewriting them can change us forever.

A quick heads up. Today's episode touches on trauma and how we cope with it. There are references to suicide and revenge. Rachel first met Greg in California. They were skydiving. They were at what's known as the drop zone, where skydivers gather after a jump. He was funny, he was kind, he was intelligent. He was also good looking. We are using first names to protect the privacy of people in this story. He has beautiful eyes, kind face, wonderful sense of humor.

Skydivers tend to be a lot of A-type personalities, a lot of ego, but he wasn't like that. He didn't have this need to be the center of attention. I found that appealing. Rachel started to see more of Greg, and she noticed that he made a point of putting himself on the same jumps she was on. So one day, he was sitting on the grass having a lunch. I came over with an extra mountain dew or some kind of soda and we sat down and just started making small talk. Shortly after that first chat, they started dating.

Three months in, Rachel was doing a jump during some rough weather. And I came in on some very windy conditions and had a little accident and nothing major but I did break my wrist. Greg offered to come over and take care of her while she healed. We spent a lot of time together at that point and I was tickled and delighted. Greg never moved out and soon they were engaged. About a year later Rachel and Greg went skydiving in Arizona. She recorded some of the jumps on her GoPro. It was still very early in the morning.

It's an amazing experience. Ready, go! You have about a minute of free fall and then you break away and then you deploy your canopies. After landing, they quickly went up again. Thousands of feet above the Arizona desert, they jumped. We did another free-fly jump with two other people. We did what's called a for-way. You have to come in in a certain pattern. You have to pick your spot and you do a landing pattern. When they broke away for the landing, Greg went first.

As he neared the ground, Rachel noticed something that looked like a little tornado below her. The weather as it warms up can create dust devils. Greg was headed straight into one. Just before she made her own landing, Rachel caught one last glimpse of him. I can see him completely split on the ground. I can see his canopy is completely collapsed. It shouldn't have been collapsed at that point. I can see people running toward him.

Rachel landed safely and rushed to Greg. He's faces contorted in pain. They've just pulled off his shoe. He has a bone sticking out of his foot. He has a busted femur, both fear broken. Greg was medevac to a trauma center. Rachel followed by car. He was already in surgery when she got there. His first surgery to repair his femur, and they put a rod down his leg. It turns out that the initial injury, which was the femur

fracture, was the easiest to fix. It turns out that his feet and his leg and his lumbar area would all just have issues. Greg was sent home to continue his healing. A primary care physician took over his case. She was new, a replacement for Greg's long-time doctor who recently retired. Greg's biggest issue now was pain. It was almost unbearable. Still, they felt sure that with time and good medical care, it would ease. We felt like we were beating the odds.

He kept his feet and it was just, it was hard, but we were gonna get through it. But Rachel says the new doctor was cautious. Doctors who treat pain have to balance competing goals. They want to minimize pain as much as possible, but as a recent opioid epidemic shows, the strongest drugs can also harm patients and lead to deadly addictions. How far do you go with medications? How fast? These are tough questions that often do not have clear-cut answers. She had a protocol.

I remember her showing it to me once, and she was going to try each drug. Well each drug has to be approved. He has to try it for a few weeks. If it doesn't work, we have to come in. We have to look at the next one. Nothing. Eased Greg's pain. He told me on a regular basis it was like someone was stabbing

him with a knife and turning the knife and he just was constant. This is the kind of pain, you know, is a nightmare. Rachel felt powerless. Meanwhile Greg got worse and worse. He stopped getting out of bed. He was gradually not eating. He was curling up in a ball. He was just shutting down. And he would tell me about how much pain he was in. And then he wouldn't talk for the rest of the day.

Rachel says Greg told her he couldn't endure the pain and that he began to talk about killing himself. He says, I feel like I'm scratching my fingernails on rocks trying to pull myself out of a well and I just keep sinking further and further in and I want to end it. ended. Rachel found a pilot who agreed to fly Greg to a hospital in Mexico. He could receive stronger pain medication there. But Rachel says that doctor said it would take a few weeks to transfer his medical records. I was so we don't have a few weeks. This is an emergency. He's not going to make it. He isn't such terrible condition. And again, it was like talking to a brick wall. As the doctor turned to leave, Rachel remembers doing something unexpected.

She fell to her knees. And I looked at her and I looked at her staff. There was a couple other women in the room and I said, please, this is so important, he's not going to make it, he's in so much pain. Please, I'm begging you, help him." And they just looked at me, the couple of other gals they looked upset, but they didn't say anything and she just looked at me and she says, we have to wait for this to work. And she turned around and she just looked at me and she says we have to wait for this to work. And she turned around and she left. Five days later, Greg hauled himself into a car. He got himself to the top of a tall building and he flung himself over the edge.

He called 911 right before he did it so that he wouldn't be laying there. He didn't want to upset anybody. He left a note at the house. It was a scrawl in this crazy handwriting. It was basically, I don't want to die. I'm so sorry to go. I love you, but I just can't take it anymore. The first call Rachel made was to the doctor.

I got her on the phone and I told her, I said, you know, he killed himself. This is your fault. Rachel can't remember how the doctor replied, but she says it wasn't what she needed to hear. I was so upset with her. I kept feeling like this didn't have to go this way. You could have helped him. We could have, you know, maybe lost his feet or something, but he could have been here and he certainly could have been kept comfortable. I mean, nobody treats a person like this. We don't treat animals like this.

We do not know the name of Greg's doctor, and our story is not about whether she did something wrong. Our story is about how Rachel saw things and what happened next in her mind. As the days passed, Rachel's grief turned to rage. She began fantasizing about revenge. Rachel knew she and the doctor lived in the same town. She kept thinking about what would happen if she bumped into her at the store. I imagined that I would see her in an aisle and I would walk up to her and she'd see me and I'd see her and I'd spit in her face. I'd just nail her right in the middle of her

face and I'd look at her in the eye while she would look shocked. And then I would slap her. And, you know, maybe I would throw a few more punches. And I would tell her, I would tell her how awful she was. And how awful she treated this beautiful human being. And I wanted her to be afraid. I wanted her to be sorry. In some kind of twisted way, I wanted her to get how she'd taken a beautiful human being from the world. That she'd let a beautiful human being go through incalculable suffering. For what? Why?

When Rachel did this, when she thought about confronting the doctor in the supermarket, something surprising happened. I would like feel a loosening up of like all the tension in my body as I would think about it. It was like a fantasy. It was like, if you have a fantasy about a vacation and you go off and you imagine how wonderful a beach is going to be, let's say, and you can feel how you relax and it was sort of like that. I would imagine how

satisfying it would be for her to suffer some little bit of what Greg suffered. The more detailed and vivid her fantasy became, the more it soothed Rachel. I could run this whole movie in my mind. I could see her at the market. I could see the shock on her face. I could feel the satisfaction of hurting her, I mean emotionally, and somehow that was going to help me, somehow that was going to make it better. As the days passed, Rachel starts wondered even further.

And I was getting a lot of relief out of running this scenario in my mind. And the more involved it got, the more it occurred to me that, well, if I follow through, I'll get even more relief. Rachel eventually confided her fantasy to a grief counselor. And she jumped on it. And she basically said, you need to stop thinking about that right now. You've got this way to plan out. Do you know what will happen if you do that? You will get arrested. You could lose your job.

And I remember being shocked and I remember thinking it was going to be difficult to stop thinking about it. And once the therapist asks you to let this go, you said it was difficult in the session, but in the days that followed, what happened? I did a lot of journaling and I realized that I had been caught up in some kind of, I don't know, crazy grief response, crazy loop. I realized that if I, counsel hadn't talked to me, I think I had the potential to act on it. The fantasy just kept getting richer and richer as each, you know, few days would go by. And I ultimately decided that for the rest of my life, if I think she's anywhere nearby, I will leave.

I will just leave. Was Rachel's fantasy of revenge a precursor to her committing a crime? How grief-counselor worried about that? Rachel worried about that too. Such a response is understandable, but it also reflects the larger way many of us think of fantasies, even our own. We react to their content instead of asking about their origins. Rather than seeing them as an imperfect way our minds are responding to trauma, we

recoil from them because we fear what they might reveal about our inner demons. When we come back, what would happen if we looked at our fantasies with less judgment and more curiosity. So I got into this terrible worked-up state writing it but it was only writing. It's safely contained on that beautiful white frame of the paper. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Once upon a time there was a boy. One day he was exploring the mountains near his home when he saw a small white bird flying to a cave.

He decided to follow it. At first it was easy. The bird was bright against the dark rock walls. But soon the gloom turned into a suffocating blackness. The boy couldn't see the bird anymore. He couldn't see anything. He wasn't sure how to get back out. He turned in a circle, trying to get his bearings.

And that is when it happened. The sand beneath his feet began to shift and move and open and then. Okay, let's stop there. You want to know what happens next. The truth is, I don't know. I made up the story to illustrate a point, how narratives can take hold of our attention and draw us in.

As a lifelong reader, Raymond Mar knows all about the appeal of a good yarn. But as a psychologist at York University in Toronto, he's also interested in why stories have the power to hold us captive. You're in a dreamlike state and you're so deeply immersed within this world that even, you know, if you sort of get jared out of a piece of fiction that you're highly engaged with, it takes a while for you to re-enter the real world. Over the years, Raymond has studied why stories work this way. Why are our minds so attuned to narrative and storytelling? Think about the last really great book you read.

If someone asked you what you liked about it, chances are your answer will be about how the story made you feel. Raymond says there's a reason for that. This deep sort of immersion in the story, this deep imagination, draws upon the same sort of emotional systems that we use in the real world.

So the sadness that we feel when a character that we care a lot about dies, for example, it's not the same as a real loved one dying, but it's similar enough that it can produce things like tears and the same sort of physiological symptoms of sadness. And we experience this as sadness. Some years ago, Raymond analyzed data from studies in which people were asked to read stories while undergoing brain scans. He found that when we are immersed in a story,

our brains respond as if we are part of the fictional world that we are seeing on the page. So if you have someone read a very simple sentence about a person kicking a soccer ball, not only will you see parts of the language network become involved, but you also see activation in the motor cortex, the same part of the brain that we use to actually move our bodies. And more importantly, this activation is quite specific. So you'll only see a part of the motor cortex activated that's related to the lower half of the body. It's worth pausing a moment and underlining this point. When we read about someone kicking a soccer ball, our brain is activated in the same way as if we were actually the ones

kicking the soccer ball. Raymond began to wonder if something similar happens as our minds process the social challenges that characters encounter in stories. So reading, I believe, it's possible that it presents to us an imagined social world for us to interact with. So it gives to us a representation of human interactions, human psychology that we can then learn from in very safe circumstances. Put another way. Stories give us a chance to experience the real world, without the risks of the real world. They allow us to run different scenarios and to think about the consequences of those

scenarios. If we are evaluating a move to a different city, for example, we might imagine what it would be like to live in that city, what would be great about it? What would be awful? Stories, daydreams and fantasies in other words allow us to imagine different versions of ourselves. They allow us to ask, what would I do in this situation? How would I react? What kind of a person would I be? Raymond figured that if all of this was true, reading about other characters should make us more insightful people. I had senior colleagues tell me that you're going to find the exact opposite.

It's people who read a lot that are going to be more socially awkward, they're going to have more difficulty and understand other people. Raymond came up with a study. He tallied the reading habits of volunteers and then had them take a test. It's called the reading the mind in the eyes test. Volunteers were asked to examine the photographs of people's faces. Specifically, the photos showed only people's eyes. Could volunteers tell what emotion the person in the photo was experiencing, using only the expression in their eyes. And what we found was that people who were exposed to more narrative fiction did better on this test of understanding what other people are thinking and feeling and what their mental states are.

So there was a positive correlation. Now, a correlation is just an association. We don't know that reading books caused people to be better at reading the mental states of other people. It's entirely possible that the reverse could be true, the people that are really good at understanding other people are also interested in fiction because fiction portrays social content, or that some third variable explains the association between these two things. What is clear, however, is that you cannot follow books and movies without being able to skillfully tell what's happening in the minds of various characters.

Appreciating a story requires you to see the world through the perspectives of other people. It requires empathy. So if John gets into a fight or a conflict with a playmate and then he leaves, you might have to make the inference that he left because he was upset or that he left because he won or that he left because he lost or he left because he was humiliated or any number of different, any number of different mental states. Right, they're all

possible. But, you know, in order to make sense of the entire story, you would hopefully have to make correct inferences. So, you're initial inferences. If they don't seem to be consistent with the other events, then you might change your inferences. As we run through what's happening in the minds of various characters, good stories call on us to revise our initial assumptions. They invite us to be flexible. And again, there is an overlap here between what happens in the brain when we read and when we experience things in real life.

It seems like the brain regions that we employ when we're understanding stories look quite similar to the brain regions that we employ when we're trying to understand other people's mental states, which is a nice piece of evidence, I would say, that's consistent with this idea that when we're reading fiction, we're immersing ourselves in the world of fiction, we're drawing upon the same brain regions, the same network of brain regions that we use when we understand the real world.

This, of course, is the insight that Aristotle had centuries ago. Stories provide us with catharsis, a mechanism to safely explore difficult terrain. You don't actually have to kill your son in real life when you're upset with him. You watch a play and see what happens when a character events her age. Instead of getting hauled up in court for murder, you just sit in a theater for a couple of hours and clap when the curtain comes down. If stories can serve as a safe space

to explore trauma and repressed feelings, can they also be used to heal those traumas? All my working life, I focused on research into therapeutic writing, the value, to the personal self of writing, writing journals, poetry, stories. This is educator and therapist, Julie Bolton. She believes therapeutic writing can help people discover and address deeply buried trauma. That's exactly what happens with memories of severe trauma. They get locked up in the memory and you can't access them. And one of the very few ways of accessing those kinds of traumatic

memories is through metaphor, I side ways. you can't come straight at them, your mind is so injured by it, it doesn't want you to find it. Gilly tells a story of one student, a doctor we'll call Mark. He took a seminar she was leading for physicians. The only thing I asked this group of doctors to do was to write about a significant event in their life. And this one young man, he shared with us a poem he'd written about how when he was little, how his brother had been run over and killed and the poem is just extraordinarily powerful. I asked Gilly if she'd read a bit of it to us.

The grown-up stand around watching, grown-ups know what to do, the grown-up stand around watching. Is that Simon lying on the pavement? He's got blondie hair like Simon's. The grown-up stand around watching. A boy's been run over, another kid says. Is that Simon lying on the pavement? He was walking in front of me. The grown-up stand around watching. Mrs. Bailey puts a blanket over him, but I can still see his blondie hair. Later, Mark wrote this about writing the poem. I had never

talked about what I was feeling when Simon died. Now I've written about it I can and do talk about it. Simon and I had had an argument about a fortnight before he died. I'd asked Simon not to walk with me to school. You know what it's like, an older brother wants to be with his own friends and doesn't want to be seen taking care of his little brother. Until I did this writing, I felt guilty about Simon's death, that it was my fault for not allowing him to walk with me. As an adult, that guilt ate away at Mark. It kept him from being the kind of doctor he wanted to be.

Then he wrote the poem. And he said it's changed my practice of medicine so much because in the past I could not relate to a child who was very ill at all, especially a child who was dying. And after that he could. We all have stories in us, Julie says, stories that need telling. Sometimes, releasing them is enough to bring comfort and peace. But stories also allow us to do something we cannot do in real life. On the page, we can rewrite the stories from our past. We can reframe them. We can invent new characters.

We can change how we behaved. We can turn them into fantasies. Instead of walking ahead of a younger brother on the way to school, we can walk alongside the child. We can make anything happen in a story if we want to. And it's one of the things I suggest people do especially of what they've been exploring is something harrowing, tragic, something horrible or something that they've got stuck with and I suggested that they

they try writing it with a different ending, something totally different happening. Asking people to turn their life experiences into fiction comes with another deep psychological benefit. A good story does not have caricatures, like cartoon heroes who always behave like heroes, or villains who are always evil. A good story needs real people, with complex emotions and conflicting impulses. So when you write about events that happen to you, you might find yourself getting into the minds of people who offended you, people who hurt you. You might find yourself asking, why did this person do this? What was their motivation? Storytelling in other words, can become a vehicle for empathy.

Julie tells a story of another physician. He started writing a story about his encounter with a child patient and their parents. And he got incredibly worked up writing this because the child had nearly died of meningitis. And the parents were absolutely furious with him because he hadn't diagnosed the meningitis before it became dangerous and the child had to be hospitalised. And I don't know if you know, but meningitis is extremely difficult to diagnose in its first stages. So he wrote the story, he wrote out his

fury at the parents who were so angry with him, I'm trying to get him struck off as a physician. And then he thought, well, I'll try what this person person, Julie Bolton, tells us to do, what she advises us to do. I'll write it from the point of view of the parents. I can't see it's going to work, but I'm going to try it. And he did. He started writing the story from the point of view, the perspective of the parents. And he said he had written hardly any words before he sat there in floods of tears and suddenly realized what it was, what was going on here that here were two people

who were absolutely terrified. They were angry with him because they've been so scared, their lovely daughter was going to die. And he said, I instantly just felt sympathy and empathy for them. My anger just disappeared from these first few sentences I wrote of writing the story from their point of view. If you decide to try Julie's advice, you don't have to share your story with anyone else. Julie herself has probed some dark memories and allowed herself to say and do things on

the page that she would never dream of saying or doing in real life. I wrote all these absolutely awful things and I allowed myself to do it because I knew nobody else needed ever read them. So I got into this terrible, worked-up state, writing it, but it was only writing. It's safely contained on that beautiful white frame of the paper. When we come back, a woman who used fiction to heal deep psychological wounds and turned her fantasies into a lucrative career. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Krista Sandor's early childhood is a blur of different homes in different places. We lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Illinois, and then we got to Kansas City when I was 10, so that's a lot of moving. During that 10th year her parents divorced. Christa's dad moved to Chicago and Christa stayed in Kansas City with her mom. They bounced from place to place. Along the way her mom started dating a new guy. It was a very unsafe relationship he wasn't a nice man. Over the next few years, Christa remembers many nights of being woken up by yelling.

It scared her. And I would crawl out of bed and I would get down and I would put my ear to the vent. You know, and it's really hard to ask a 12-year-old to do a Thessa situation if you're going to need to call 911 or to get your mom help. Krista never talked to anyone about what was going on or how it felt to her. Instead, she just buried it all inside. Because her home life felt chaotic, Krista loved school. She still remembers kind teachers who nurtured her and made her feel safe. But she also vividly remembers the unkind ones who seemed to enjoy dispensing little

cruelties. She had a particularly hard time interacting with her middle school music teacher. She was just right on me and she had like a snappy voice. It was like snap, snap, snap when she spoke to me. I felt it almost like in my brain I would leave band and I would just feel that snap, snap of her voice in my head and just not being enough. And I mean trying so hard to play the music and keep my posture. It almost, it just was overwhelming.

It just killed any love that I had for music. I quit. I stopped playing. I just gave it all up because it only brought me pain because I felt like I was so terrible. Like I couldn't do it right. You know, here's another person I can't please in my life. All of us have experienced moments like this when we have felt lonely and insecure, when shame and humiliation wash over us, but like most everyone else, Christa stuffed these bad memories into the back of her mind. As she got older, other slights, grown up slights,

got stashed away too. Once when she was in college, she fell for a young man she'd met at a fraternity. She was a freshman, he was two years ahead of her. When we talked on the phone a little bit and I'm still, you know, just like glowing with excitement and he asked if I wanted to go there was going to be a party and if I wanted to go with him and I thought, oh my gosh, this is great. Yes, I want to go with you." Christa spent hours preparing for the date. She picked out her favorite green blouse and put hot rollers in her hair. I wanted my hair all curled and ready to go. He picked her up to take her to the party.

Everything seemed great until they got there. Then it was as if Christa didn't exist. He walked off to join his friends and never returned. But that's when I realized I'm like, this guy doesn't like you. This guy's kind of a jerk. Christa even told himself. I went up to him, I can see it now, he's dancing with a bunch of girls, you know, red solo cup in his hand. And I

said, I'm gonna leave with my friends. This is not for me." And he said, that's good. And I said, why? And he said, because your friends are permanent and I'm only temporary. And I thought, oh my gosh, like that is stuck with me forever. Like, he never liked me. I was just some chick going to a party with them. And that right there, I just, oh, it wounded me. I was so mad at myself for seeing a situation so wrong. In the years I've followed, Krista settled in Denver and got married, not to a jerk, but to a really nice guy. They had two sons. Life was pretty great. But then one day, her left eye began to give her trouble.

She went to the doctor who sent Krista for an MRI. Immediately after the scan, she learned what was wrong. She had MS, multiple sclerosis. I can remember those first few days, you know, we took the kids downtown to get ice cream and I remember just like sitting there thinking everything is different now. Everything in our life is going to be different now. And I didn't know how different. And I didn't know how it was going to impact the kids or if my absentee was going to have to take care of me. It was pretty rough. I really retreated inside myself. But then a good friend sent Christa a gift, a romance novel.

And I thought, what are you doing? But why would you send this to someone diagnosed with a disease that nobody can cure and she's like just read it? It's exactly what you need. So Christa did as she was told. She read the book. Oh, it's got such a naughty title. It's called Man Hoar by Katie Evans.

But it's a wonderful, wonderful book, a wonderful series. It was the escape that I needed. So, for a whole year, that's all I did. It was audiobook romance. I just, you know, between five and seven books a week. Krista, listen what she was folding laundry. I wasn't looking to fall in love. I wasn't looking to lose my mind and common sense over the most beautiful green eyes I have ever seen.

She listened as she drove the kids to play dates. I wasn't looking to drive myself crazy with lust. She listened at the grocery store. Standing in the produce at Whole Foods, it was a very Colorado moment. And I remember there was a steamy scene and I was just like standing there. We scrambled about arms and legs twisting this way in that.

Looking at like a whole row of like bell peppers. When I realized I was gonna die, the only thing I could think about was you. I must have been there for 10 minutes. I couldn't stop dreaming about him. You can zone out in the produce department in Colorado. I mean, I was waiting for someone to Namaste me. I want to make you blush from here to the tips of your feet.

I wasn't ready to like turn it off and then go order my hamburger meat. He's the first beautiful thing I've ever seen that actually hurts to look at. The books became a lifeline. They held her fear at bay. For the first year after my diagnosis, There was hardly five minutes, 10 minutes go by where I just didn't think about MS or having MS or I'm with my kids and I'm like, no, my kids have a mom with MS.

It was just this constant loop in my mind when I was kind of alone or even just, with the kids doing anything, I've just popped right into my brain all the time and I found the only time where it really was gone was when I was immersed in these stories and these characters' lives. After about a year of obsessively listening to Romances, Krista made a big decision. She wasn't just going to read romances, she was going to write them. And I said, I think I'm going to, you know, dust off that English minor, and I think I'm

going to do this, I'm going to write a book. Krista wasn't interested in the kind of romances her grandmother had devoured, the ones featuring damsels and distress and the swarthy men who carry them off. Krista liked contemporary romances. I was kind of more drawn to these kind of powerful women in charge of their sexuality, you know, kick an ass and solve and crimes. Now Krista was an unknown.

She had never published before. She didn't have an agent or inside contacts. So she self-published. She called her first book, The Road Home. It's about a woman confronting her past and finding danger and love. The book was a huge success. And then it became two books and then it became a five book series and then another three book series. It's bloomed and blossomed into something really wonderful.

The books did more for Christa than make her a star author. They allowed her to explore and then reimagine the painful memories she had stored away in the back of her head. It started with that first book, The Road Home. In it, Krista created a character that was modeled on her own mother, who passed away some years ago. First I thought, well maybe I should just write about her, and then I decided, no, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to write this romance. I'm going to make this situation okay for the heroin.

She's going to get through what I was kind of going through with my mother at the time. In the book, the heroin's mother is Judith Lewis. She has a boyfriend named Travis. Here's Krista, reading from the road home. Travis and Judith were the Bonnie and Clyde of narcissism and irresponsibility, moving from town to town living only for themselves. The relationship was always tumultuous like a roller coaster, about to fly off the rails

at any moment. But now, knowing that Judith suffered from bipolar disorder, Jenna could better understand her mother's behavior, as well as her attraction to Travis. They both lived for the high and needed a constant stream of drama to survive. Krista says in creating the characters, she finally got to voice what it had felt like

for her as a small child, seeing her caregivers nearly come to blows with one another. I got to show them who they really were, what I really thought, what it was like, you know, being a child who kind of had to live with two people, so obsessed with their own kind of their own knees, their own wants, and then throw in that whole drinking and partying. So, yeah, so this first book was really allowed me to delve into it and kind of get my own say. Have a say that I never got to say. I think it's fascinating.

They're almost trying to master what happened to you. You're almost processing what happened to you. And by putting it into the lives of characters, in some ways you're able to, in some ways, do what people do in therapy, which is to hold their own experiences at some distance and look at themselves and look at their own lives and look at their own experiences with some degree of objectivity and allows you to get new insight into what actually happened to you. Is that the way it felt for you, Christa? Absolutely, and I think it brought, even though what I wrote was harsh or, you know, maybe could be conceived as cruel,

it actually helped me understand these characters more. She also got to do what Julie Bolton talked about, reframe stories and rewrite how they ended. So the frat boy who dumped her at the party, Krista turned him into a loser. I mean, we had to really stick the knife in and then give her a nice little turn. We leave him as just some douchebag in a bar, you know. That's where we leave him.

The teacher who's constantly snapping drove Krista away from music. She became Mindy Lancaster, a Dauer woman constantly trying to belittle the heroin. In Krista's new version, it was the heroine, Emma, who got the last word. What if she couldn't do it? What if her fingers had forgotten? What was one second nature? She met Mindy's gaze and saw a glimmer of triumph

flash in the woman's eyes. Mindy was an accomplished pianist, but she never risen to even a fraction of what Emma achieved as a musician. A confidence Emma hadn't known in years surged through her veins. I'll do fine without the sheet music Mrs. Lancaster. I guess you don't remember,

but I mastered these pieces by my fourth birthday. Maybe it was my fifth but who's counting? The anger that kept her away from music, away from the memories that threatened to tear her apart with guilt and grief was transforming. I've performed for the Queen of England. I think I can handle this. Writing Mindy Lancaster, Christa, says, was deeply healing.

It was surprisingly cathartic. You know, I'd never said anything. As a child, I just stopped playing. I just, I never got the chance to say to this woman, you know, you took something very important away from me, and I'm angry about it. After she put all her grief and rage into the fantasy, Krista says something amazing happened. I have exposed every raw feeling that I had about that situation and that brings me sort of a peacefulness that it's out there.

It almost cleared the way to remember that there were happier memories. It just's also the fact that it's brought you success. I mean, so, you've actually taken this pain and you've transmuted it almost literally into gold. Yeah, it's become my career. My husband's like, how many jerks did you date? Because we need some more books. I tell people I dated every jerk in Denver before I met my husband, so I'm like, honey, you don't have to worry. Between college and dating, we're golden.

So it is just really interesting to take all the heartache and kind of spin it into gold. With each new book, Christa Sandor has felt like the burdens she has carried have grown lighter and lighter. The themes of anger and sadness have given way to laughter and comedy. Writing for her has been like a cleansing rain, washing away bad memories and hurt. It is put our in touch with all the good things in her life. Many of us never think to put pen to paper or we sit down and start but then hesitate because we're afraid of what our stories mean, what our fantasies might reveal. But when we do this, we not only miss out on how our stories might transform other people.

We miss out on the power of stories to transform us. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Autumn Barnes, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, Kristen Wong and Laura Quarelle. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Special thanks this week to one of our favorite storytellers, former Hidden Brain producer, Jenny Schmidt, who played a vital role in this episode.

Thanks as well to our voice actors this week, Rachel Danzig, Scott Sylvestero, and Nicholas Otto. Our unsung hero this week is Matt Wheelan. Matt is my editor at Norton & Company, the publisher of my new book Useful Delusions. The idea that we explored today, how stories shaped the way we see the world, is also a central theme of useful delusions. Over several years, Matt helped me and my co-author Bill Meshler refine our ideas. But even more than a skill as an editor, Matt has always been kind and wise, the best kind of friend, and the ideal unsung hero. I can see his influence all over today's story as well. Thanks Matt. This

episode is part of a series on how we make sense of the world. If you haven't had a chance to listen already, check out last week's episode about how we use explanations to bring order to an otherwise chaotic world. Next week, we explore how culture shapes the stories we tell ourselves. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week.