Reframing Our Stories through the Narratives of Others

One of the most important tenets of restorative justice is the commitment to deal only with the truth. This principle might seem obvious, but truth doesn't always look the same to each party. Facts don't change, but our experiences of those facts is subjective. How we remember facts is shaped by our past experiences and by our interpretation of events. Sometimes our interpretations are colored by our past experiences, but other times other motivations change the way we remember things. For example, some prisoners may remember their crimes differently than their victims do simply because of a motivation of self-preservation. Shame sometimes also plays a role, as does fear, in how we remember things. Memory researchers call our retrieval of memories a "constructive process" precisely because we are creating a story, a narrative if you will, with how we remember events. As our lives change, sometimes our narratives change too when we begin to frame our past experiences through our more current understanding. The problem is that when two people, a victim and an offender for example, remember the same event differently, they tell different stories.

When victims and offenders tell different stories of the same event, it impedes the process of healing. Differing narratives stoke feelings of resentment and unforgiveness because it feels like someone is not telling the truth. In fact, it is entirely possible that one or the other person, perhaps motivated by fear or self-preservation, might not be telling the truth. Other cases may simply be a matter of differing subjective experiences. This is one reason why listening to the narratives of others is so critical for healing to take place. Victim-offender dialogues are designed with precisely this function in mind. When we hear the narratives of another, it often broadens our understanding. When offenders hear from a victim specific details of the harm he or she experienced, the offender gains empathy for the impact of his crime. When a victim hears the story of an offender's life, he or she may gain an appreciation for the offender as a person in need of healing too. 

In his book, Emotional Intelligence, author Daniel Goleman relates a key therapy used by some convicted criminals to develop empathy, often missing in criminal minds, for their victims. Goleman claims that when an offender tells his story from his victim's perspective, it often results in a lasting change in the offender. The reason this therapy is effective is because it forces the offender to step outside of his own subjective experience and to relate his story from the perspective of the person he has harmed. Psychologists call this "exemplary memory." Exemplary memory forces us to step outside of our world, where we seek our own good, and drops us into the world of the other. When we remember events from another's perspective, we begin to see how the event affected the other. We begin to understand the harm they experienced and to desire good for them in the future. 

My own experience speaks to how important it is to deal only with the truth. When I came to prison, I accepted responsibility for my crime, but how I framed my story, to myself and others, involved details that reduced my own responsibility. After reading Goleman's book, I began to remember my crime differently. I had thought about my victim's perspective in the past, but I'd never made a conscious choice to tell my story from my victim's point of view. When I began to do this, it changed a lot for me. At first, it opened up a fresh wave of grief and pain. Bu soon it began a process of healing in me and prompted me to have a fresh hope for my victim's healing. Now that I am committed to dealing only with the truth, I am also free to work toward healing for my victim and others, unimpeded by the burden of differing narratives. I understand now that differing narratives are sometimes simply different experiences of the same facts--and each narrative has value in the journey of healing.