By TPM Guest Blogger Alan Dilworth

“It’s hard to fight a enemy that has outposts in your head.”
Sally Kempton

Recently I have been thinking a lot about the narratives we live by, the stories we tell ourselves to make some sense of our lives and our experience living in the world. Some narratives seem to lock us up– threatening to throw away the key, others seem to set us free to take great leaps of imagination, intuition and love.

As we worked on CRASH I kept thinking about all the ways we cope with pain in our lives. And how the ways of thinking we develop to cope with pain sometimes threaten to define the narrative of who we perceive are, and how perceive the world around us.

I read that fear is a neural circuit in the brain, effecting emotions, feelings and memory. I think that fear of pain must be a very strong writer of life narratives. Then, what do we need to let go of narratives that bind us -that make us repeat patterns that lead to more pain and misery? In the CRASH narrative, love becomes the driving force for working through and loosening the grip of fear-based life narratives. And I think it is fair to say that a narrative of love, in the case of CRASH love for one’s father and one’s family, provides an alternative to the narrative of fear.

What is between the narrative of fear and the narrative of love? What happens in the mind when one moves from one narrative to the other? Obviously I have more reading to do. But I do think there is great mystery in the narrative of love. It has the power to ‘un-stick’ the bonds of twisted and fearful ways of thinking.

Stories are powerful things.