Story Work: What It Is and Why It Matters with Adam Young, Cathy Loerzel, and Dan Allender
Have you ever wondered what we mean when we say “your story” and why it matters? In this special episode, Adam Young, Cathy Loerzel, and Dan Allender sit down together to unpack the basics. Whether you’re new to this conversation or you’ve been on the journey for a while, this is a perfect place to start—or to revisit the foundation of story work.
We’re thrilled to co-release this episode with The Place We Find Ourselves Podcast. Grab a cup of coffee, find a cozy spot, and join us as we explore the transformative power of engaging your story.
If this conversation resonates with you, we’d love for you to join us in person (or online!) at the StoryWork Conference in Atlanta, GA, on Saturday, February 22, 2025. Spend a day diving deeper into your story with Dan, Cathy, and Adam. Therapists, CEUs are available! Find all the details at adamyoungcounseling.com
Episode Transcript:
Adam: Welcome to The Place We Find Ourselves podcast. I’m Adam Young, and it is truly a joy to be with not one but two guests today. Dan Allender and Cathy Loerzel. Dan, welcome.
Dan: Thank you, Adam and Cathy. What a delight.
Adam: Cathy, good to see you.
Cathy: It’s good to see you too. Good to be back.
Adam: So I’ve invited you both to talk about something very specific, which is story work, the fact that we have stories, that we are a story that God is co-authoring with us, the story of our lives. And let’s just start with what do we mean, Dan, by the idea that you have a story.
Dan: Well, I love the thought that 70% of the B-I-B-L-E, which is the book for me, is story, meaning the way God communicates, the way we communicate, the way we learn, the way we think. It’s always wrapped up, not in mere facticity, but in stories. So we encode our life, the nature of what life is in a narrative, which always involves context, setting place, but also characters, dialogue, plot, movement. We live and breathe story, so it’s often hard to define it because we are in it.
Adam: Cathy, when you think of story or story work or just your own experience engaging your own story, if somebody had to ask you, if they asked you, what do you mean by your story? What words would come out of your mouth?
Cathy: I’ve been watching The West Wing forever since it came out, and one of the things I learned in the West Wing is to answer the question you want to answer, not the one that’s asked.
Dan: Which is a story, isn’t it?
Cathy: Which is a story. No, but what I think is story. So, Gertrude Mueller Nelson, I don’t know if you know who she is, but she’s written these great books. She’s a theologian and a psychologist, and I was just reading her work because I’ve been preparing for Advent. And one of the lines that she says in it is that we need story because sometimes if it’s not true, all the way true on the outside, it’s true on the inside. And when I think about story outside of what happened to you, it’s the idea that we understand ourselves based on the combined and the individual story of what it means to be human. And so all of our stories, if you tell a good story about your life, it’s both true and not true, but it’s always true on the inside. And so when I look at stories, and this may not be helpful, but I think the way we understand our lives is by understanding, like Dan said, the theme, what does your life story look like? What’s the trajectory? What is the feeling behind it? When I talk about my story, it’s looking at it as if it’s a movie and it’s saying, what is that movie meant to show me about myself, about my community, about my family, about where I’m meant to move towards my calling, where I’m meant to fight against injustice. Our stories hold everything that we need to understand about what it means for us to be particularly human in this context. I don’t know how we live life without our stories.
Adam: And then what about the idea about engaging your story? So Dan, you’ve historically invited so many people into the endeavor of not just knowing that you have a story, but addressing it, engaging it, pondering it, reflecting on it, entering into the particularities of your story. What do you mean and why is that a worthy endeavor?
Dan: Well, it’s one thing to live your story. It’s a whole nother to be willing to actually think about your story. And I think we’re so often caught up in the particularity the mundane of normal day-to-day life that we don’t do what Cathy so brilliantly put words to. And that is what theme am I living out? How is the past shaping how I’m reacting in the moment? And it’s so important to know that when something happens, we respond in .005 seconds. You can’t even blink an eye that fast. So we’re responding out of our story, meaning out of what has shaped us to be who we are from the multitude of past stories. So what we don’t know shapes us in ways in which we’re being in one sense lived by the past. I don’t want to be lived by anyone including myself. I want to be able to live with deep awareness and intentionality, but that requires an openness to open my eyes to the past. Not only that, but to submit my story to someone else. Because what I live sometimes bears so much heartache and trauma that I tend to turn my eyes even from the past in the present. So I need other stories that is other people reading my story. And so the ability to know your past helps you shape and reshape and really reorient your life in the present and the future.
Adam: Cathy, what I want to do is I want to read not something you wrote. I’m going to switch it up. I’m going to read something Dan wrote, and I want to know how it hits you.
Cathy: Oh, fun. I love this game.
Adam: This is something Dan wrote. “Our own life is the thing most influences and shapes our outlook, our tendencies and our decisions. It is the force that orients us toward the future, and yet we don’t give it a second thought, much less a careful examination. It’s time to listen to our own story.” What stirs in you, Cathy, with that phrase, it’s time to listen to our own story.
Cathy: I find story fascinating. I love watching shows. I love reading books, I love watching movies. I see clients all day long and each story that they bring is fascinating, right? I’m looking for clues of like, what does this mean and how has this shaped them? Now, a lot of us are fascinated with other people’s stories. We consume them, we watch them on Facebook, on social media, we eat it up in terms of the latest scandal. We consume hours and hours and hours of Netflix and all of the things. Why aren’t we that fascinated with our own? I think the world would change if each of us looked at our own story with as much fervor and intrigue as we let ourselves consume the stories of other people. And I think the reason we don’t do that is because it brings up pain and grief and trauma that we don’t want to engage with. And so to the degree that we can bear both the beauty and the revelation that our own story would bring, we’re also then going to be invited to grieve the suffering that the loss, the heartache, but we find ourselves being distracted by other people’s stories so that we don’t actually have to deal with our own. And if we dealt with our own, and I don’t say just deal with it so that you have to deal with yourself, but have genuine curiosity and intrigue of what has made me, me. Why do I react the way that I react? And if we can do that with kindness and generosity, we’ll be able to overcome the grief and the heartache that we’ll never become. And in fact, we’ll actually find that the heartache and the grief that will come through engaging our own story actually brings us to more joy and more connection with the world around us versus what we’re doing now, which is just placating this need that we have to engage our stories by consuming other people’s.
Adam: So you said an interesting word in there or phrase the beauty of our own story. I think a lot of people when they think about reflecting on their story, they equate that with looking at the hard stuff, the painful stuff, the trauma, and it means that, but it means, and Dan, here’s a question for you. It also means looking at the glory of the image of God that you uniquely bear as a 7-year-old, a 13-year-old, a 38-year-old, pondering your story, engaging your story means getting to know the glory that is you, and I don’t mean intellectually, but with a sense of awe. This is one of the fundamental things that you’ve invited me to. Dan. What’s it like for you to ponder, to address, to engage, to reflect on not just the trauma, but the glory that is part of your story?
Dan: Well, I was watching my grandson Gus play soccer a few weeks ago, and he got, the ball was kicked and it hit him square in the face and he went down and like, oh, it’s a horrible experience of watching somebody you love just crumble. And coach ran out, helped him back up, and I saw him, not angrily, but push the coach away like I’m up. And I could see him looking at the coach in the eye, couldn’t hear him, but I could hear something like I want to stay. And he stayed and he played. And afterwards walking with him to the car, I said to him, that was really brave. And he goes, don’t talk to me about it. I’m like, what? This is not how the story’s supposed to go. I said, okay, okay. A day later, I said to him, can I talk to you now about what happened? He goes, not yet. Not yet. And it took several days for him to metabolize the kind of courage it took. He felt more humiliated, more in one sense, weak. And yet when he was finally able to talk about it, he finally was able to say, I think I did good. Did good to stand up and stay in the game. And so much of our beauty truly comes in the context of not mere survival, but let’s not undermine that survival is beautiful. It’s a glorious thing that you made it through a time where all you could do was read books to somehow escape your alcoholic father. Brilliant, beautiful. Can we acknowledge that our efforts when we were young to make it through what we were going through shows something of our ingenuity? Frankly, I love the word brilliance. He was brilliant, and it took him a while to metabolize the intersection between the physical pain, the humiliation, but also the incredible courage. So when we begin to name that we’re gifted, yeah, we’ve got talents, we’ve got intelligence, et cetera, and those are beautiful things, but I think our deepest beauty shows itself in that deep willingness to survive and then something of thriving, something of making goodness even in the midst of great heartache. It’s a beauty about the human condition and about the nature of story that I don’t think most people have access to because most people, as Cathy put it so well, have not engaged their story well enough to see the heartache, let alone now the category of just brilliance and beauty.
Adam: So the implication of listening to your story, if Dan’s right, and it’s time for all of us to listen to our own story, the implication is that your story, your past experiences are somehow speaking to you. So Cathy, as you ponder the idea that our past is speaking to us, if that’s true, what’s it trying to say?
Cathy: I think our stories, if we listen to them, are going to point us in the trajectory of redemption. But I don’t mean like a happy ending. I mean the sense of how your past influences your capacity to trust, to offer what you have been uniquely born to do in this world. Your past is the thing that offers you clues as to what maybe you were created for. I believe deeply that each of us were created by a God that needed us to contribute in some way to this world. I really think that we were each born to contribute, and that means that we all have something uniquely beautiful, uniquely gifted about us, and uniquely designed to be able to create beauty and goodness on this world in a face in a way that no other person can. But you’re never going to understand what that is if you don’t understand what’s already come to pass, both what has harmed you and then pushed you away from maybe what is beautiful about you. I had a chance this summer to go to the Faroe Islands, which is in the middle of the Atlantic, in the middle of nowhere. No one even knows what these, I mean, most people have never heard of these islands. I was there for five days, but I’m not even sure I’m saying them correctly. And they’re rainy and it feels like the end of the earth. And what happened was this, a year ago I saw a picture of a statue from the myth called the Sealskin Woman, and it was this incredible statue, and I saw it on Facebook. I was scrolling, avoiding my own life, and I found this picture and I looked at it and I was like, I have to go there. Wherever this is, I have to go. And I went to my husband, I showed it to him, and I was like, Hey, I love you. I have to go here. And I just researched it and it’s the middle of the Atlantic and it’s really far away and crazy, but I just need to let you know that there’s a spiritual pilgrimage here for me that I’m going to need to just deal with and get on a plane. And he was like, okay, are you going to go by yourself? I’m like, maybe, but I don’t really care at this point. All I know is I want to go. And so then I started to recruit and I called my friends and showed them the picture and said, Hey, who wants to go? Apparently these are the Faroe islands, this is where they are. They’re south of Iceland, west of Denmark, north of Scotland. I’m going to go who’s with me? And solely but surely no one except for two friends said yes, which is remarkable that two friends are going to go. And so I then planned a whole trip for my family. I felt bad about it, so I planned a family trip to Iceland, and then I left my family to go home. And then I went on to the Faroe islands with my two friends. And as I’m on this ferry, so the fro islands are 19 island archipelago, and you have to do a bit of a thing to get to this particular statue. So I’m on this tiny little ferry with five cars in the middle of nowhere crossing this fjord to get to the other side to go see this statue. I’ve just dragged two friends across the world to go do this with me. And I’m sitting there on this ferry and I just hear God be like, this is who you are. You see a picture and you convince people to trust you and to get on a boat and to get on a train, and to get on a plane and come to the end of the earth to go see a statue that no one has ever heard of in the middle of islands, that no one in America apparently goes. And this is part of who you are because of your story. This is who you’re meant to be. And it’s, you’ve gotten into a lot of trouble for it because I am willing to take risks and bring people on adventures, and I dunno how it’s going to end. And sometimes I get myself into a pickle that I can’t get myself out of, but that is who I am. And so the question of what is your story speaking to you? Well, it’s speaking everything if you’re willing to listen, and it speaks to what you do next and what your calling is and helps you grieve the fact that I’ve done this my whole life. I’ve pushed the boundaries. I’ve been the tip of the arrow, and that’s created such goodness in this world and harm, and it’s my story. And so what am I going to do with it? Except keep going when I see the picture and I’m willing to do it again and take another risk and go see something remarkable.
Adam: Dan, What’s happening for you as you listen?
Dan: Well, I have been without question a deep beneficiary of being on many ferries with this glorious, and the waves at times have seemed like they are going to drown us. And on the other hand, there is nothing more than the human heart desires than to be caught up in the adventure, the advent of God. So in that sense, I love it. But further, a dear friend of mine, Chelle Stearns, we taught a course called Lost at Sea that begins with the silky myth that Cathy’s talking about, which is a story about people drowning and becoming something other as a result of that death. And the reality is ambiguous loss is really what that particular statute is about. So when we get captured by reality, we’re really captured by this intersection between brokenness and beauty, between the fact that everything is flawed and lost, yet there is something within us that so deeply craves what we were most meant for in Eden and what we are going to know in the restored heavens and earth. And that is freedom, play, joy. And what Cathy’s described is like I’m mesmerized by the story what sweet wildness and indeed, woman, you are crazy.
Adam: Let me flip the script and read something Cathy wrote. And Dan, I want you to respond to it. And this is about Cathy speaking about family of origin story in particular. And she says, by understanding more of your family of origin story, you can tend to the parts of you that were left behind but are now in need of healing and care. When you think about parts of us that were left behind but are now in need of healing and care, what comes up for you, Dan?
Dan: Well, the first thought is, again, Psalm 42 in Psalm 43, “Oh my soul, why are you downcast within me?” Here the psalmist is talking to what? To a part of who he is, that is his soul. Is he the same as his soul at one level? Yeah. Yet on the other hand, we have to have a capacity not only to listen but to speak, and we’ve been talking about hearing, listening to our own story, but we’re more than passive watchers. We’re active engagers with our story. And that beautiful, beautiful statement is our family of origins where we have known our deepest learning, both beautiful and broken. So often we leave behind parts of ourselves that indeed feel like they would encumber us if we were to actually step into them. So what was it like for you when you were an 8-year-old boy humiliated by neighborhood boys and closed, taken off and mocked? What was it like for you as a 12-year-old girl as you wanted engagement with somebody of the opposite sex and you felt the reality of your own facial blemishes keeping you from being able to be sweet, kind and wise? All that to say, we have parts of us that we need to talk to and to ask questions of and let those parts come back actually felt reentered because now we’re in a conversation of redemption. It’s not going to happen quickly and easily, but it opens up the possibility that we can begin to unearth some of the grief, some of the loss, some of the shame that continues to play out to today. We’re not just dealing with the past to do some kind of naval gazing. We’re exposing and engaging the past to better understand and to engage those parts that are still operating today, even if we don’t have clear cognizance of how they’re actually manifesting.
Adam: In many ways, I think that the invitation to engage your story, particularly when you were a boy or a girl, is an invitation to grow in kindness from you to you. So all of us have relationships with ourselves, and none of ourselves are unitary. We are a multiplicity of parts. And there’s a 6-year-old part of me, I know him well, and there is an eighth grade part of me that I also know well, and they bear different heartaches. And the question for me is, what’s my posture towards those two boys? And will I have a posture of some measure, curiosity and some measure of kindness as I ponder what that 6-year-old endured and what that eighth grader endured? Cathy, when you think about the category of kindness just towards your own heart in your own story, if I could ask you a little bit of personal question. How have you grown either in kindness towards the girl or grown in listening to your story. What’s that looked like for you?
Cathy: For me, when I started to engage my story, I had a lot of shame and contempt for the little girl who was so confident but really awkward. And I had so many stories where I would get out beyond my skis. My confidence was more than what I could deliver. I was young, I was kind of precocious, and I told this story before, but there is this one video of me where I’m playing piano in front of this whole group of people, and I’m terrible, and I keep making the mistake over and over again, but I have this confidence in me that’s like, surely they all want to hear me play this. And surely I think I’m better than I am because of, again, this is all storied where part of my confidence was true and lovely. And part of it was the idea that I could do no wrong. And I got set up within my family of origin to not understand who I really was or my own limitations or that it was okay to just need to learn before you get on a stage. And so when I look back at those stories, I first time I engaged, I cringed like, oh, that’s so embarrassing. I’m so embarrassed for her. How could someone let me do that? How could I not read the room? What is going through my head? And where else did I do that? No wonder why I didn’t have a lot of friends. No wonder why all these things, all these accusations start coming through. And so much of my reaction to those moments, I made vows and commitments later to say, I will never be humiliated again. I will not feel the feeling that I had in that room after I realized that no one else really wanted to listen to me. And I was terrible. And it was really embarrassing, humiliating. And so I think part of what I’ve had to do is to go back and not to say, oh, that little girl, she is so brave. Look at how she just played even though she was terrible. Well, that’s not really the story. You can take that angle. But the reality is this is a little girl who is set up to be way beyond herself when she was really young and she never got to just a bad piano player who shouldn’t be playing in front of an audience because she hadn’t practiced enough. She never got to just be young. She was born into a world where she had to be an adult really quickly. And so she made a lot of mistakes, was humiliated, and that’s all part of the setup. And so for me, I’ve had to go back and look at that story and offer such kindness and love and generosity and kind of help cover her over and deal with her felt exposure, but also where she was set up to be a little mighty mouse when she was just 10.
Adam: Yeah, thank you. And for those who are listening, if you want to listen more deeply to your story, not just to these pieces of ours, but to yours, we want to invite you to come to Atlanta, Georgia. We went last year. We’re coming again this year, 2025, February 22nd Saturday to Trinity Anglican Church, which is on the west side of Atlanta. And we’re going to have a story work conference, which is a one day nine to five in the sanctuary at Trinity Anglican. It’s a beautiful space, and the purpose of the conference is to help you understand, not just understand your story, but to kind of equip you and inspire you to go deeper. And by deeper, I don’t just mean into the particularities of your story, but deeper into kindness, deeper into how are you going to tend to those unhealed parts of you that are still there, that are still alive and at play in your adult life. For those of you that can’t make it in person, the conference will be live streamed. You can sign up at adamyoungcounseling.com and you’ll be sent a link to access the live stream. And if you’re a therapist type, there are five CEUs that are available as well, and those can be purchased on my website also. Dan, as we close, you’ve had a career. You’ve had half a century in some sense devoted to exploring stories of people. Why have you persisted?
Dan: I think the simplest answer is my wife intrigues me more than almost anyone or anything in the universe, and she’s really troubling. She is stunning, beautiful, but I know her. And yet, the more someone, the more there is vast unknown to explore. So I feel like I’m so privileged to be in relationship with people who continue to want to grow ultimately in the great story. And what’s the great story? The great story. I am so grateful for my wife, but she is a revelation of God. I want to know your story, but your story also opens up what my heart most deeply desires, and that is to know, is all this true? Is Jesus really true? Is this really worth a life? In that sense? I’m so hungry for redemption, and that’s why I stay in it.
Adam: Well, Dan, thank you for your perseverance and your commitment, your persistence, your tenacity. Cathy, and I know Cathy well enough to say that she and I have both deeply benefited from your engagement in our stories. Cathy, thank you for being here. Dan, thank you for being here. Look forward to being with you in Atlanta.
Cathy: Yeah, see you then.