In this episode of the Power of Partnership podcast, host Cherri Jacobs Pruitt chats with Dr. Piera Giacconi, visionary founder of Scuola Italiana Cantastoria, on the power of storytelling and narrative medicine to foster Partnership-based cultures of care. You will learn how storytelling transcends traditional boundaries and weaves healing for both teller and listener.
In this episode of the Power of Partnership podcast, host Cherri Jacobs Pruitt chats with Dr. Piera Giacconi, visionary founder of Scuola Italiana Cantastoria, on the power of storytelling and narrative medicine to foster Partnership-based cultures of care. You will learn how storytelling transcends traditional boundaries and weaves healing for both teller and listener.
Welcome to the Power of Partnership podcast. I'm Rianne Eisler, president of the Center for Partnership Systems. This podcast brings you voices from the partnership movement, eva using partnership practices to build a world that values caring nature and shared prosperity. The Power of Partnership podcast is hosted by Cherry Jacobs-Pruitt, al's policy and Partnership Scholar. Today, cherry interviews Dr Piera Giacconi on the power of storytelling to change narratives in workplaces, hospitals and communities. And now on to the pop podcast.
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
Welcome, piera. I'm so looking forward to our discussion today and digging deeper into the power of our narratives and storytelling in shifting our paradigms to help create a more caring world. Can you start by sharing more about the Scuola Italiana Cantastoria, or the Italian Storytelling School? How did the school get started and what kind of programs does the school offer?
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
Thank you for the question, cherry. All started in 1991 in Barcelona, at an international congress, and one of my teachers said to me why don't you go to have an interview with that man? And he was a Frenchman specialized in fairy tales for adults. He told me oh, you know, I do fairy tales with manager Great, that was what I wanted to do to bring this powerful tool of personal development inside the organization and, year after year, step after step, I realized how to put together all this, all that I studied, and to have, at the end, a certified method, internationally certified, in narrative medicine.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
We started officially in 2010, and we founded an association in order to promote the culture of partnership, of respect and of joy of joy and our intent was to work with children, for the psychological safety, for the confidence, for the respect for the differences. Or we can work in clinical areas, but not as a psychologist. What is wonderful in narrative medicine is that everybody can do it. You don't need to be a physician, you don't need to be a psychologist, a psychotherapist, everybody is human, touch you into your deep humanity and to face the other in his deep humanity, and this is something magical and this is so wonderful. And so they are not histories to make children sleep, to fall asleep your babies, but they are stories to awake adults. That's a true life, and this is why I was so enthusiastic about the possibility to bring fairy tales everywhere, not only with children. This was my idea. You know when you light? Ah, that's it.
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
Can you talk about the impact that Rianne Eisler's, that her work has had on the founding of the school?
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
Yes, with pleasure, about Riani Iser. Before I met Antonella Riem, which is a professor of Udine University who translated all the books that are in Italian available from Riani, and when she gave to me the translation of the Real Wealth of nations, this was absolutely inspired me because I said, everywhere I went, I spoke about that, I wrote about that and I said the caring economy is not the economy of an hospital, it's everywhere. It's carrying exactly the planet, the consequences, the family. And this is when we founded the association, Navotseli Lefiabe.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
Into the laws of the association we have the respect for everybody, the respect for the planet, the respect of anything closer, with some colleagues and we more deeply into the economic areas, to speak to women that want to leave their jobs and that they want to do their real job, to speak to men that want to do an extraordinary job of their life and not to go with shoulders like that every day. And so we decided to to open to other professors, and now we have doctors from Rome and consultants from Milano, we have nutritionists from Udine, from Friuli. So we are from different areas in Italy and we are experimenting what Riani says to work with an economic intention but also with a very strong ethic intention and wanting to build a different way of managing managing a company, an organization. At the moment we are still an association, but who knows in future?
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
How does that narrative medicine process work? Can you give us some examples?
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
I can tell you a story. Once a lady came to my art therapy studio because she wasn't able to answer at the phone and after writing and using fairy tales, what happened was that she was blocked because she found her partner. She found her partner coming back at home at the evening, dead at the entrance, and this was under a lot of many other things, and at the end she said, ah, what is that? That terrible sadness that she was dominating, that she was controlling with her mind, and the tears were never enough out. And so all that sadness remained inside.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
So we speak about fairy tales and that slowly, slowly, slowly, naturally comes out. So, working, changing the imagination, changing thoughts, we build from inside to outside. We build a new reality which is more true and more correspondent to our inner sense of life. So what we are born for, this is what fairy tales speak about, and narrative competence is very important in every area of work. If you are in a hospital or in a school or in another organization and you don't have the narrative competence to be able to hear, or to be able to say no, or to be able to say now come closer and tell me what is wrong with you, things can become worse and worse and worse.
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
And then working with you, you are listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. If you would like us to share your partnership story or if you would like to become a proud sponsor of the POP podcast, please contact us at center at partnershipwayorg. And now back to today's episode. Can you speak a bit more about how narrative medicine was founded?
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
During the 90s of the last century, there was what is called the narrative turn, and narrative became very important everywhere at the end of the 90s and in 2003, Dr Rita Charon, at the Columbia Hospital, which is in Bronx in New York City, and she visited the patient and after reading the papers, it was very difficult to understand what the person had and she said to this man in Spanish, she said but please, can you tell me your story? And the man started crying and he said it's the first time that the clinician asked me what story? And I am going from one clinician to another and nobody understand what is wrong with me. Clinician to another and nobody understands what is wrong with me. And this was her light and said it's important.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
Narratives are so important and, yes, as Riani says, we we use more brain connections when we help others than when we are fighting with others and we receive more dopamine and all these substances that are released by our brain when we do something which is okay for us, which is, I would say, in our beauty, in our best expression of our inner beauty, Because the lady to say the beauty we fall in love in fairy tales is a metaphor of our personal beauty. This is so simple for children and so difficult for adults. So simple for children and so difficult for adults.
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
Do you know if there are other storytelling schools similar to your school that exist around the world?
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
Unfortunately there aren't schools like our school at the moment, because we are the only one who works with fairy tales, meditation and clay. But in the United States, for example, there are the Duke University, there is the Duke University, the Columbia, that have inside the first, second and third year of clinician education. There are courses of narrative medicine where students can go and learn through the classical literature, through the wonderful, the wonderful masterpieces of literature around the world. They can be inspired and write about their emotion or analyze a piece of masterpiece of literature and reverberating in together with the story. There are some books which are interesting. You can find the books of Brian Hurwitz, which is the British professor, and you can find the books of Dr Rita Charo, which are two at the moment Are listeners able to access any of the courses from your school virtually for those who are not located in Italy?
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
Yes, we have online courses once a month. Through this wonderful possibility which is the online connection, we can play together, we can breathe together, we can speak about fairy tale, what we like of that or what we don't like, what we hate of that fairy tale like of that or what we don't like, what we had it of that very day, and we can learn some tools that we can utilize, reuse in our work or personal life, because this master, you can follow it, also without writing a thesis, without having your practice at the end, but simply as a personal development tool, because you want to know better about you or you like fairy tales, fairy tales, fairy tale, a fairy tale, a fairy tale in Slava.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
And how can our listeners find out about those online resources? They can tap lavotdelfiabecom, which means the voice of fairy tales, and my name is Piera Giacconi, and they can find a YouTube channel with many stories recorded referenced in the show notes for today's episode.
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
In addition, the books that Piera referenced will be in your show notes for today's episode, as well as, of course, a link to the Center for Partnership Systems, where you can always find information about courses and resources to dig deeper into Rianne Eisler's cultural transformation theory, her domination, partnership, social lens, continuum and the four cornerstones that make up every society of childhood and family relations, gender economics and, of course, narrative and stories. Economics, and, of course, narrative and stories. Piera, before we close, I wonder if you have any final words you'd like to share with our listeners.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
Yes, yes, cherry, I want to speak about magical words. We are facing this moment a lot of fake news, a lot of empty words, and what makes a word magical is the quality of your presence, is the truth of that word, is the intention in which you say it and I would say, because fairy tale speaks about human qualities and you can't buy them. You can't drink them If you are sad, you can't drink some happiness If you are ill, you can't operate and put inside your body hope because you are, it's bad period. If you go to supermarket, you can't buy a kilogram of one pound of confidence because you are the hot and what. What is one thing that you have inside and that you like the most of yourself.
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
Tell me one that's beautiful. I think that changes at times, so for today, it's curiosity.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
All right, I can agree with you, yes, yes, I feel that you put the question for today, for the interview today, with a lot of curiosity and I could. It's like, it's like to have this sense, the sense of smelling. Your curiosity makes me feel a sense of smelling very strong, and we say that traditional storytellers have a sense of smell for gold, because human quality are gold in fairy tales is. When they speak about gold, they speak about something that is uncorrectable. It's a metal.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
The property of gold is that it cannot be destroyed by acids. It's always gold. You can that it cannot be destroyed by acids, for example, it's always gold. You can beat and beat one gram of gold and you can cover one meter of surface. So one gram of curiosity can regenerate one square meter of stagnation, stagnation or ignorance. So this is why I'm so powerful. What power quality is? So the magical word for you is curiosity, and I hope that the podcast listener can find inside themselves one thing that they like the most of them and that could be really a magical word to think about, to say to us inside Also, when we are facing a bad person, a bad moment, a bad situation Beautiful.
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
Thank you so much, Piera. It has truly been a pleasure interviewing you today.
Dr. Piera Giacconi:
Thank you, cherry. Thank you to Rianni Eisner that will be hearing and knowing about our history. We are so moved to know her close to us and this will give us a lot of force of strength us a lot of force of strength thank you for listening to the power of partnership podcast.
Cherri Jacobs Pruitt:
We're grateful to rising appalachia for the use of resilience as our power of partnership theme music. If you would like us to feature your partnership story or if you would like to be a proud sponsor of the power of partnership podcast, please, please contact us at center at partnershipwayorg. We hope you enjoyed this episode and will leave us a review on your favorite podcast channel. And don't forget to subscribe to be notified when new episodes are released. I'm Cherry Jacobs Pruitt. See you next time on the Power of Partnership podcast.