Annie Brewster had always seen herself as strong, physical, and capable. A lifelong athlete with degrees from Stanford University and Harvard Medical School, she was used to folding life’s challenges neatly into her identity as a resilient, focused person — someone always able to achieve her goals.
None of this aligned with the words she heard from a neurologist in 2001: “You almost certainly have multiple sclerosis.”
Nope, she thought. She left his office and didn’t see another neurologist for five years.
“I couldn’t take it in, because I had these ideas of what I could accomplish and what I could outrun,” says Brewster, now a practicing physician and author of The Healing Power of Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Navigate Illness, Trauma, and Loss.
Just below the surface of Brewster’s denial lurked shame. She feared that she had somehow caused her illness and that she would lose herself to it. She felt betrayed by her body. When her symptoms accelerated and she began treatment, she told almost no one. The story was too painful.
Then in 2009, Brewster found herself delivering an MS diagnosis to a young patient. Seeing her despair, Brewster decided to share her own experience, including how she holds hope despite an uncertain future. After the patient heard the story, she said she felt immediate relief.
So did Brewster.
She soon shared her story with her local public radio station. Rather than the judgment or pity she’d feared, she received acceptance and support from the colleagues and friends who had tuned in. Yes, her life had taken a new direction, but she was still Annie.
After all those years of hiding her MS from others, Brewster found that grappling with her health story, and then sharing it with others, was profoundly healing — even without a potential cure.
This can be true for all of us. The stories we tell about our health really matter.
The Value of Health Stories
A life-changing diagnosis or injury can make us feel like strangers to ourselves. Who are we without the same body and abilities we’ve always relied on?
Humans across time and cultures have turned to storytelling as a way to find meaning in health crises.
For example, many Indigenous oral traditions feature stories about illness, injury, and survival, and these may be shared during ceremonies and healing circles.
“Our brains are wired for storytelling,” says psychologist Jonathan Adler, PhD, who researches the relationship between mental health and personal narratives. “It’s both an evolutionarily programmed adaptation and a deeply cultural practice.”
Research shows that the stories we tell about our health — to others and to ourselves — have an impact on our ability to weather difficult changes. And, sometimes, changing how we tell our health stories helps us reclaim an empowered relationship with our bodies. A different story can make more space for our minds and hearts to heal — even if we can’t regain our former health status.
Narrative-based therapies, such as expressive writing, have been shown to help people process their feelings about difficult experiences, bringing a range of health benefits.
In a study of nearly 300 patients with renal cancer, published in 2014, patients who explored their feelings about their diagnosis in writing were found to experience fewer symptoms and better physical functioning than a control group.
Telling one’s health story to others can also help counter the loneliness and isolation that often comes with illness. This effect applies to both parties.
“You as the storyteller are affirmed when someone else hears your story, while your listener receives a new lens through which to view their own evolving story,” says Adler.
Stepping outside our own narratives long enough to examine them also provides new perspective.
Once she began to share her diagnosis, Brewster realized that MS had not really diminished her. She could see she had also gained things, including increased empathy and a deeper sense of connection to others.
Approaching our health this way, says Adler, invites us “to consider whether the story we’ve told ourselves is the only one that can be told.”
Changing Your Narrative
A growing body of research in narrative psychology suggests that how you tell your health story affects your mental health more than the story’s actual content.
“Not only are you the main character in your life story, but you are also the narrator,” says Adler. “Often, it’s a real mind shift to realize I’m not just doing my life. I’m also telling the story of my life, and the way I tell it really matters.”
In 2016, Adler published a review exploring the connection between life stories and experiences of well-being. The paper identified several narrative themes associated with stronger mental health — even when someone’s story is deeply difficult. Those themes are coherence, agency, communion, redemption, and accommodation.
“Deciding to tell your story — whether you simply write it down on paper and keep it private or share it with a larger audience — is a brave act and . . . ultimately a healing endeavor,” Brewster writes.
Adler and Brewster now teach these five themes — and how to work with them — to patients and physicians at a nonprofit called the Health Story Collaborative. Here we explore how the themes look and feel via the health stories of real people — and reflect on some prompts from Brewster that can help you tell your own story.
1. Coherence
Life rarely follows a neat plotline, says Brewster, and health challenges can introduce a profound sense of incoherence. By organizing your health story after a disruption — outlining a timeline, noting important characters and relationships, describing details, and offering some interpretation of why it all matters — you’ll make the changes easier for yourself, and others, to grasp.
In psychology, this theme is known as coherence. It describes how a person’s story can bring order and meaning to an otherwise chaotic experience.
Telling a coherent story, even a hard one, has been correlated with reduced stress. A study of mothers caring for children with autism, published in 2019, suggests that telling more coherent, well-integrated stories about their caregiving experiences predicted less parenting stress. The mothers even showed less biological aging at the cellular level.
Importantly, these benefits were linked to how well the story held together, rather than how positive it felt.
Finding coherence — as well as other supportive narrative themes — involves literally writing and revising your story. This is the core of the work Brewster and Adler now do at the Health Story Collaborative.
They believe sharing your story with another person can lead to even deeper healing.
“Stories don’t just live in our head,” says Adler. “They live in the space between us.”
Ask yourself questions like these as you begin to write, and then tell, your health story:
• What are the key moments in your health story?
2. AGENCY
If a health story reveals someone’s belief that they have some influence over their own experience, it demonstrates a theme of agency. The story of writer and performer Taylor Coffman is a good example.
Within moments of giving birth to her daughter in 2022, Coffman went into sudden organ failure. “I had a heart attack, my kidneys failed, and I had a pulmonary embolism,” she recalls. “The doctors couldn’t read my chart fast enough.”
Luckily, one doctor recognized what was happening: The stress of childbirth had triggered an underlying disorder called complement-mediated thrombotic microangiopathy (also referred to as atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome), causing Coffman’s body to form dangerous blood clots.
“I am absolutely a miracle of science,” Coffman says of her survival. Yet, as she awakened from a medically induced coma two weeks later, she was discouraged by the lack of coordination among the 20 or so specialists working to keep her alive.
“I had previously been a project manager, and I saw gaps in communication,” she says. “I began to realize my voice was valuable in this process.” Coffman raised her concerns, and the physicians created a better system to collaborate. “That was a turning point in my care.”
Coffman’s sense of agency continues to sustain her as she navigates life with a rare disease. She chronicles her health story on Substack and social media, offering insights and advice to others with chronic illness. “I don’t see myself as passive in this experience,” she says. “I am on the team. I advocate for myself, always with respect.”
Develop agency in your own health story with these questions:
• What personal strengths have helped you navigate this illness or injury?
• What can you control?
• What have you learned that might be helpful to others in a similar situation?
3. Communion
The theme of communion arises in health stories that involve the support of close, nurturing relationships — such as the story of Alisa Kennedy Jones.
Jones suffered her first epileptic seizure in 2010, shortly after the onset of perimenopause. The author of Gotham Girl Interrupted has since endured hundreds more seizures, including two that led to multiple broken bones in her face, requiring extensive reconstructive surgeries.
Early on, Jones tried to minimize her illness. “You don’t want to be a burden, and you don’t want to be a source of drama,” she says. Aware of the stigma associated with epilepsy, she told only close family and two friends about her condition. When she moved with her youngest child to a new city, she felt completely isolated.
“I couldn’t tell my new employer about this or they would start to doubt me,” Jones says. “And if they started to doubt me, I could lose my authority, my job, and my health insurance.”
Over time, her seizures made it unsafe for her to operate a car. One day she took a bus to pick up her child from school, and another mother she barely knew, Camille, offered to give them a ride home.
This gesture ended her isolation. It brought Jones into a circle of other supportive women; what’s more, Camille found a house in her family-friendly neighborhood for Jones and her child to rent.
“We all took care of each other,” Jones says, recalling game nights and tag-teaming childcare when anyone in the close-knit group needed help. “It was just a really remarkable group of women looking out for each other.”
Identify communion in your own health story with these questions:
4. Redemption
Not all hardships can be overcome, but they can often be transformed. A health story that identifies events and situations that started badly but improved over time demonstrates a theme of redemption.
Matthew Sanford was 13 when his sister and father were killed in a car accident that left him paralyzed below his chest. In the years that followed, Sanford absorbed “a mythology of healing stories” from well-meaning experts, friends, and family intended to help him overcome his loss and disability.
He was told, for instance, that any sensations he felt in his lower body were phantoms to ignore. He was told that building up his arm strength would compensate for the silence of his lower body. Doing so would supposedly enable him to have a “relatively normal life.”
“But what if I really wanted to be whole?” Sanford asks in his book, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence.
Sanford gradually learned that his lower body was not completely silent, and that he could reintegrate his body and mind. This led him down his own path toward wholeness.
At age 25, he began studying yoga. He eventually founded Mind Body Solutions in suburban Minneapolis, where he guides others with disabilities to engage with their bodies in empowered ways — and to rewrite their stories on their own terms.
Redemption is not just about overcoming challenges, Sanford explains. It comes from telling your story fully, complete with grief and paradox and humor. “It’s not about trying to change anything.”
Find redemption in your health story with these questions:
5. Accommodation
Some health experiences can’t easily be assimilated into our life’s story. But when we’re able to change the story to accommodate a new reality, we’re performing something called “accommodative processing.” This skill is often connected to a greater sense of meaning and purpose.
When Aimee Prasek, PhD, lost her father to suicide in 2000, she felt like she had survived an earthquake. “Everything came crashing down, and life did not look the same the next day,” she recalls.
At 17, Prasek had no coping skills and few resources. She became deeply depressed. “I did not know my feelings, and nobody asked me about my feelings. My mom signed me up for a grief group and that was about it.”
A year later, she headed to college “soaking in depression and anxiety.”
Prasek signed up for some free therapy sessions on campus, where she was introduced to cognitive behavioral therapy and breathwork. When she returned home, a minister at her church advised her to “press into the mystery” of her loss with curiosity and self-compassion. These glimpses of healing sent Prasek on an academic and spiritual quest to understand the connection between mind and body.
Today, two decades later, Prasek co-leads a mental health program called Joy Lab and cohosts its companion podcast.
“Struggling is an important piece of this,” she says of the growth she experienced after losing her father. “After an earthquake, there’s search and rescue. There’s lots of people that come together to assist, and then there’s rebuilding. It takes time and attention and effort.”
Prasek’s profound loss is part of her life story — but it’s not her entire story. That’s integration.
Learn to accommodate your new reality with these questions:
The Case for Narrative Medicine
Perhaps the most common venue for sharing health stories is a doctor’s office or hospital. But unless clinicians have been trained to engage skillfully with your story, much can get lost in translation.
“Healthcare professionals may be knowledgeable about disease, but they are often ignorant of the abyss at which patients routinely stand,” writes Rita Charon, MD, PhD, in her groundbreaking book Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness.
The field of narrative medicine, which Charon helped establish through her work at Columbia University, seeks to address this gap by encouraging medical students and practitioners to study literature, philosophy, and ethics. These fields can help healthcare professionals learn to become “close readers” of their patients’ stories.
By taking careful note of details, including characters, plot, themes, gestures, and silences, the clinician can better understand what’s happening medically, as well as what the patient values most. The aims of narrative medicine include making clinicians more sensitive and empathetic toward their patients as well as helping physicians become more self-aware and reflective in their own lives.
Patients can also help their care teams pay closer attention to the important details of their own stories (see “9 Strategies to Become an Empowered Patient” for more).
“I really want my doctors to see me as a whole person, not just a problem to solve,” says Taylor Coffman, a writer, performer, and patient advocate who lives with a rare disease.
Coffman recommends going to appointments with detailed notes to share. These can include your symptoms and questions plus a list of what matters to you in your life and in the care you seek. One tactic she recommends is bringing a photo showing yourself at a time when you were well and doing things you enjoy or that are important to you. (Learn how to boost your health literacy to understand medical information, ask better questions, and become an active partner with your care team at “10 Tips to Take Charge of Your Next Medical Visit.”)
“If you come in on your sickest day, your doctors don’t know what ‘well’ looks like on you,” she explains. Instead, she says, you want to tell a story that communicates, “‘This is my normal and this is my goal.’”
This article originally appeared as “Healing Stories” in the July/August 2026 issue of Experience Life.
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