How Your Story Lives in Your Body: Exploring Trauma, DNA, and Healing

I believe that we each carry a story within us. That the unique and individual holistic makeup of our very being, our structural DNA, is formulated by psychological, biological, social, and spiritual distinctions. That the very nature of our cells bear something of the generational and cultural stories of those before us. That, perhaps, our stories were being formed long before our entrance earthside. 

How might your perception of yourself, of your story, change if you considered that your bones, muscles, veins, organs, live and move and breathe by way of your earliest childhood experiences, and the ones of those who raised you, and spoke your name over you. That that name carries the weight of thousands of stories, and that those stories have made their way down to you. Running their course and taking shape through your very DNA.

We are not a single story. We are the stories and the lifeblood of the ancestors who have come before us. Moreover, for those who will come after us. Would you believe me if I told you that you get to change the trajectory of how those stories will continue on to those after you? And that they do not need to remain settled into your systems as they are now? That if they compromise your well-being, have brought you harm, pain, wounding, suffering, impact, you are already innately so worthy to have say, agency, and autonomy for how you continue to bear the weight of those stories? 

One of my favorite female musicians, Brandi Carlile, says in the chorus of her song, The Story, “all of these lines across my face tell you the story of who I am, so many stories of where I’ve been, and how I got to where I am, but these stories don’t mean anything when you’ve got no one to tell them to, it’s true, I was made for you.” The beauty of music is that you get to interpret it however you want, but my interpretation of the lyrics above is this: there is a desperation within the DNA of our cells to be witnessed, to be seen, and to be heard by those around us. From the ever-changing lines around our eyes and our mouths, to the shifting of the shapes of our bellies, the skin that encases our arms and legs; our bodies are longing for the stories within us to be known.

Stories and music and DNA really aren’t too different when you think about it. There’s a composition, a rhythm, melodies, harmonies, an interweaving of notes and of sounds. A beginning, middle, and end. An opening, a rise, a climax, a fall or return, and a closing.

Will you receive the invitation to consider your body? To courageously share your story with another? To ask someone to step into the depths with you and hold you up within? To honor the stories that have made you, you? To rage with you. Grieve with you. To rebuild hope with you. To draw you towards delighting in the goodness of your body. To consider the brilliance of what it has done to carry you through these stories. To remind you of your beauty.

We cannot do this alone. May we be so curious as to welcome the body and the DNA of another to help us rewrite the narrative, to compose a new song. You are worthy of a grand resolution and denouement. You are worthy of redemption.