You Are a Story: Understanding Identity, Storywork, and Healing

PART 2: You Are a Story

Why Your Second Story Isn’t the Truest Thing About You

Some people insist they don’t have a story.

Others fear theirs is too much for anyone to hold.

Both responses usually point to the same reality: somewhere along the way, it became unsafe to believe our story mattered.

But Storywork starts with a different claim.

“You don’t just have stories.
You are a story.” (Daniel Taylor, Healing Power of Stories)

The Story Beneath the Story

There’s a line in The Chronicles of Narnia that names something essential. Aslan speaks of “a magic deeper still”—an older truth that existed before betrayal, harm, or death entered the world.

That image offers language for what Storywork calls your First Story.

Your first story is the one written before pain had a voice. Before shame rewrote the script. Before survival became necessary.

It’s the story of who you were meant to be.

Scripture uses a word for this that is easy to miss but hard to forget once you see it: poēma—often translated handiwork or masterpiece. It’s where we get the word poem.

You were not mass-produced. You were poeted into existence. That is not sentiment. It is theology.

When Another Story Takes Over

And yet, most of us live as though a different story is more true.

The story that says:

• You’re too much or not enough

• Your desires are dangerous

• Your needs are a burden

• You must perform, hide, or numb to survive

This is what Chris Bruno calls the Second Story—the story shaped by brokenness, fear, shame, and loss.

What’s deceptive about the Second Story is that it often forms around something good. A longing for connection. A desire to belong. A need for safety. Over time, those longings get hijacked, distorted, or shamed.

We don’t just suffer—we adapt.

And eventually, the Second Story feels more familiar than the first.

Survival Is Not the Same as Identity

Many of the behaviors we hate most about ourselves once kept us alive.

Addiction. Withdrawal. Perfectionism. Control. Numbing. Over-functioning.

These are not evidence that you are broken beyond repair. They are evidence that your nervous system learned how to survive when something essential was missing.

Storywork doesn’t excuse harm. But it refuses to confuse survival with identity.

And it asks a radical question: What if your First Story is more true than your Second?

If that question stirs both hope and resistance, you’re paying attention.

The ReStory© Primer Course helps you begin distinguishing between the story that shaped you and the story that is most true of you—without rushing, spiritualizing, or bypassing pain.