Stefan Hammel (Germany) and Marie-Jeanne Bremer (Luxembourg) are organizing the 3rd International Festival of Therapeutic Storytelling in Otterberg, Germany on Oct 15th – 18th, 2020.

The convention languages are in German and English. At the moment information in the www. is available in German [Link website]. 

However, if you consider to come, don’t hesitate to contact us (e-mail-Adress ifte@hsb-westpfalz.de) and we can figure everything out so you can join us.

Here’s the story of the salmon in English  (Stefan Hammel, Handbook of Therapeutic Storytelling, p. 193f.)

A salmon was travelling along the annual salmon run, further and further upstream. He had leapt up rapids and jumped over enormous boulders – and even used all of his power and skill to ascend waterfalls. “Not long now,” said the salmon to himself at last. “I remember being here before – I passed it on my first evening on the journey down. I’m much larger and stronger now, and I’ll have reached my destination in just a few hours.” The salmon redoubled his efforts, wanting to make faster progress. But as he did so, the current also seemed to become stronger. The path down the river had seemed easy, but the way back seemed pure torture. Sometimes he was too tired to swim, often he lacked the concentration to jump properly, occasionally he had to swim around the rods and creels of the salmon fishers and once he even had to avoid the paw of a hungry bear. Again and again he stopped to regather his strength, but the river kept on flowing to the sea. By the evening the salmon noticed that he had not made any progress – if anything, he had gone backwards. Sad and disappointed, he found a protected spot between two boulders on the bank. He thought to himself, “It must be possible to reach my destination – others before me have managed it. But how?” Then the clever fish had an idea. “I’m not going to try and get there as quickly as possible any more; I just want to make progress. All I will ask of myself is to get a little bit closer to my goal every evening than I was in the morning, and if I do that day after day I’ll eventually reach my destination. As long as I’ve made some progress by every evening, it won’t matter how short a distance I’ve travelled – even if it’s only half an inch.” The salmon plucked up his courage and started again. Some days he barely made any progress at all, but mostly he travelled much further than he expected – and if he didn’t, he remembered his resolution and was content with what he had managed. After a few weeks, he reached his destination; a lake near the source of the river. He looked around, and found that only a few other salmon had reached the lake before him – most were still trying to reach their destination in the shortest possible time.

The story “Hearing Difficulty” picks up on the fact that tinnitus sufferers often focus their attention on the wrong thing. It can be used not only in connection with tinnitus, but also as a metaphor for many other internal and external conflicts.

I remember a particular teacher who taught me when I was at school and whose lessons seemed to me both easy to follow and informative. Then one day another pupil pointed out how often she ummed and ahhed while she was talking, and that ruined everything. Up until then I had been able to listen to her words and had not even noticed the hesitations, but from then on I could only hear, “um…. ah….. um.” The words that she said were nothing but pauses between the sounds.

“The Hindenburg Path” describes a dialogue which appears to make no sense because one of the interlocutors is hard of hearing.

People suffering from a hearing impairment may seem odd (unapproachable, indifferent, arrogant etc.) and be treated accordingly, which may mean that they increasingly grow to resemble the mistaken image which others have of them. The same applies to people who find it difficult to communicate because they grew up speaking a different language. In the situation described in the story, the problem is probably a result of the man’s efforts to avoid loneliness by attempting to communicate in spite of his hearing impairment. The story reflects the general principle that “odd” behaviour often turns into “ordinary” behaviour once we are aware of its context.

Mr Neumann greeted Mr Krauss, an elderly man who lived nearby. “Hello, Mr Krauss” “Hello… and where have you come from?” Mr Neumann pointed in the appropriate direction and replied, “From down there.” “Oh, the Hindenburg path.” “The Hindenburg path? Why’s it called that?” “It’s so steep you can’t go up it.” “I see. But what does that have to do with Hindenburg?” “Haven’t you ever heard of the enormous Hindenburg airship…!”

The story “Blinded by Love” is an example of a minimal conversion disorder, and can be told e.g. to people experiencing a psychological crisis and suffering from symptoms relating to perception or mobility.

As I walked through the pedestrian zone, I wondered why I was finding it so hard to see things. What could be wrong with me? A delayed effect of the laser eye surgery I had undergone last autumn? My vision was normally 20/20, and I couldn’t understand it. When I was driving on the motorway that evening, I strained my eyes to peer through the windscreen and find the best angle of vision. Where had all the cars gone? What on earth was going on? The answer was supplied by my friendly unconscious. I had just spent three days at a conference on trauma which had involved a lot of biographical work, and I had also fallen for a woman who was not interested in me. As soon as I asked myself, “What am I finding so difficult to look at?” the visual impairment disappeared. Things like this happen, and more often than you might think

The story “Christmas Bell” can be used to illustrate the phenomenon of “institutional blindness” or to highlight the fact that the unconscious mind tends to provide the conscious mind only with new information or information associated with a message of some kind (a warning or the answer to a question).

On one of the last days of April I took down a Christmas bell which was hanging from a hook on the ceiling. I had got so used to seeing the bell as part of my surroundings that I had not noticed it at all during all the months which had passed since Christmas. I had simply no longer perceived it. It was the last of the Christmas decorations – or was it?

The story “A Walk Along the Beach” illustrates another simple method of hypnotic anaesthesia. The problem is not that it is difficult to induce an anaesthetising trance, but that we often do not believe that everyday trances can fulfil the same role. What is more, we do not generally notice that our pain has disappeared when we are either in a pain-free trance state between painful waking states or at a later stage (because we are absorbed by something else, and because the change from a trance state into a waking state is associated with amnesia).

A doctor had to carry out an operation to remove a patient’s large toenail, but the patient could not tolerate painkillers. “What should I do?” he asked her. “I’d feel like I was torturing you if I operated on you while you were still fully conscious!” The patient shrugged her shoulders. “Where do you most like going on holiday?” he asked. “The Baltic Sea,” she answered. “My husband and I have had some wonderful walks along the beaches there.” “Tell me about them, and immerse yourself in the tale,” said the doctor. “Dive deep down into your memories and describe everything you see, hear, feel, taste and smell on your walks there.” The woman started her story and kept on going. “Now a storm is brewing,” she said as the doctor began the operation. She saw the storm approaching but remained quite calm.

“The Unscrewable Body” can be used in connection with medical interventions or as mental preparation for sport. Sportspeople must however be particularly aware of the risks of anaesthetising oneself while training. Care must be taken to avoid any possibility of injury or the worsening of physical conditions as a result of eliminating pain signals through suggestion.

I once knew a man who had a very strange talent; he could simply unscrew the lower part of his body from the upper part whenever he went for a walk – like unscrewing the lid from a jam jar or vice versa. Then the lower body would walk alongside the man while his upper body supervised from above. Sometimes the legs, stomach and backside would move a couple of hundred metres away from the upper body, but they never ran away and always came back. At the end of the walk, the upper body and lower body would screw themselves tightly back together again. Then the head would say, “What a good job I didn’t have to listen to the legs moaning all the time on our long walk.” And the legs would say, “What a good job that we didn’t have to listen to the head’s unkind warnings and pep talks.” Everyone would be happy and content, and they would sit down together for a cup of tea and a chat about the different things they had seen during their walk

The following stories demonstrate various techniques for hypnotic anaesthesia. The case study “Go Away” involves taking the pain as a starting point and then rapidly minimising it through a plausible chain of associations. It illustrates a typical feature of verbal pacing and leading, namely that the pain (the problem) is referred to directly at the beginning, but only mentioned indirectly as an “inconvenience” by the end.

A woman attending a psychotherapy session suddenly developed a bad headache. She explained that it was linked to a problem with her cervical vertebrae for which she was undergoing medical treatment. Her face was screwed up in pain, and it was clear that she was struggling to focus on anything else. I told her, “That must really hurt. It must hurt a great deal, and you must be wishing that it would go away soon, that it would perhaps go away in three minutes or in two minutes, or that it would go away in one minute or in half a minute, or perhaps even sooner. When do you think this inconvenience will go away?” “It has almost gone already,” she answered very calmly.