Understanding the Embodiment of Narrative in the Therapeutic Exchange
September 27, 2025

Embodied storying

Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy,D

Why does telling a story about a past situation change how we feel? And why have we not wondered more about this simple virtue, a virtue of everyday life supercharged in psychoanalysis?

I think in part because we have a prejudice against stories. We tend to see stories as ephemeral distractions, and patient’s stories as trivial or defensive. Instead, in our work, we often seek to bring out an emotion as though it is secluded inside a person. Hence we say, “How did that make you feel?” as though that might lead us to the bedrock of the body. And emotion is indeed in the body, we feel it deeply in the body, but it is also just as strongly situated in the world. If a young teenager comes into our office after losing a fight in a schoolyard, we make more expansive contact with their emotions not by labeling them as “shame” but by putting together a story that places their feelings in the experiential situation that gave rise to them. “I imagine you wish you had hit that kid back” is a far better start than just simply naming the categorical emotion. If we learn as we talk to the boy that he was brought up in a strict Christian household where he frequently heard the adage “turn the other cheek,” then we understand his shame in yet more complex ways, and it may very well dissipate with this new understanding. One’s embodied feelings and one’s situation in the world are two sides of the same phenomenon, and if one configures the situation differently, one’s embodied feelings change, because story and feeling are entangled from the outset.

Emotions are situated in stories because the human world is a storied world. That boy’s schoolyard is composed of concrete and metal fencing but also of a thousand storylines waiting to be enacted in unique ways. When a boy is in a schoolyard, he knows how to behave schoolyard.

But just as our embodied actions are a kind of storying, our storying after is a kind of embodied action. In psychoanalysis, we do story, we don’t tell story. Story in psychoanalysis then is a verb, not a noun,  a dynamic activity in which words work in coordination with gesture, gaze, expression, vitality affects and cadence, enacting something very different from what is evoked by a set of statements on the printed page, namely because our storying checks in with the body, changes with the body, and in the process changes the body

I’d like to offer two vignettes now, one illustrating how our embodied actions in the world follow a loose story structure, the other illustrating how our storying about such happenings afterwards is also a relational, dynamic action in the world – an action that can change how we are in our bodies.

First, storying in action.

Every summer, I go with my family to a little farmhouse in Deer Isle, Maine. And we always spend one day on kayaks, island hopping, which is a thing people do in Maine. One ventures into the freezing cold sea to explore little uninhabited islands, sometimes consisting of just an assemblage of rocks around a cluster of trees. Kayaking through Penopscot Bay may feel very here-and-nowish but a tremendous amount of narrative history goes into it. First, there’s the tradition of island hopping, a multi-generational storyline that organizes the situation from the outset. We also need to know the routes of the lobster boats at this time of day and know how to avoid them, and a million previous incidents and stories go into that embodied know-how. We signal to each other in various ways. If someone points in a particularly vigorous way in a direction opposite to the one we are going in, we know there is danger, probably a lobster boat, perhaps a rock. The particular meaning of the signal comes out of previous signalings during previous kayaking trips.  Our movements have a grammar and a vocabulary. We know from previous trips that most of this island’s shores are too rocky to land on. So we glide in safely between the rocks, one by one, each quickly pulling their kayak onto shore to make room for the next person.

And so completes our little story in action. We had no map of this particular kayaking trip beforehand. Our signaling, our avoiding of lobster-boats, our gliding between the rocks, all this massive background knowledge emerges only as we participate in the action itself, drawn from a thousand incidents and anecdotes, none if which we need to recall. They are sedimented into the body. We are storying in action.

Now for the action of storying as it might take shape in therapy.

Let us simply reverse the situation and imagine a patient named Gus coming into my office after a Kayaking trip with his family. The following is a highly fictionalized account based on an actual session with a patient in a quite different situation. But the gist is similar.

Gus is 25 years old. He sinks into his chair and tells me his vacation was “okay.” When a patient comes into the room, I often have no memory of what we’d been talking about for the last few weeks or even yesterday, but as soon as they start talking, even before they start talking, as soon as they bring a certain posture into the room, strands of previous stories come to mind that potentially represent the situational side of the feelings I perceive in them. This is much the way my knowhow around lobster boats comes to me in the moment of kayaking. Now “okay” can mean many things, but the slumped tone of Gus’s “okay” following a family vacation, causes me to read “okay” as a signal of despair. And I begin to think about how Gus sees himself as the black-sheep of the family.

Gus begins to describe how the family kayaking trip turned into a kayak race between him and his brothers. Gus describes falling behind in the quasi-race. When he slides into the shore of the island, the kayak goes over a rock and capsizes. I just close my eyes and shake my head in recognition of what this must have been like for him. I really don’t know what to say, but I believe his experience of my participating in his experience has calmed him. In a softer voice, Gus now tells me about a conversation with his father afterwards, in which his father struggled for words and ended up saying simply, “I just want you to be happy.” Gus read this as a meaningless rote phrase that revealed the depth of his father’s disappointment in him. Gus has tears in his eyes. Even though he got to it last, this is clearly the crux of his distress.

We circle this moment, look at it from many angles, as we might circle an island looking for a soft landing. We are immersed together in the elastic time of narrative, where what took a moment to happen can take an hour to tell, and as we think about all the players in this drama, go off on historical tangents, another idea begins to form for me. I note that Gus’s father, a captain of industry, raised his children with a laissez faire ethos drawn from business, where fierce competition between the siblings was held to be a virtue. We have talked about this many times. Again this background comes to me as-needed, through the embodied action of telling, a potential story beginning to take a vague still meaningless shape in my imagination, but I start to talk about it. I am heading in a direction but I don’t know quite where. Gus responds that no, he thinks his father has softened in his old age. His father now wishes that he could forge a more meaningful relationship with his children, but doesn’t know how to do this. I realize out loud that in this Kayak trip, father’s old laissez faire system failed spectacularly. Gus begins to speculate that his father’s loss of words might reflect his own regret, a disappointment in himself as much, if not more than in Gus. Gus laughs and says, Dad’s pretty self-centered. It’s likely he made it about himself.

Gus couldn’t have come up with this story on his own. Nor could have I. We enacted it together. Will this idea hold up. I’m not sure. Perhaps it will shift again, perhaps not. The narratives of psychoanalysis are always provisional and contingent. But it fits, and it works for now, and it changed Gus’s body.

This is the ordinary, extraordinary miracle of psychoanalysis and of human life in general. It is this phenomenon of story changing the body that inspires a parent, when a toddler runs to them crying, to take them in their arms and ask “what happened?”

Thank you.