I always feel there is a certain shift in the weight when I tell a friend something that bothers me about my life. It's as if the fears and worries are less terrible once they are in the open and then I can cope better and get the much needed distance for more objective reflection. When I write the distance increases. Though I'd be writing about myself, I could actually be writing about someone else. It's a way of replacing what I find not beautiful or disturbing and recreate with it some sort of art (even on a low level as am no proper writer). Then it's like recreating myself, finding the ulterior motives and giving meaning to my acts.

Stories connect us. They are like distinct portable packages of experience that can be shared a bit like a meal.  A good story well told can take us places and reveal a lot about the story teller.  When we tell a story, we can usually sense how it resonates for the listener.   Stories are more than accounts of events.  The events have passed, but we're not done with them.  Whatever it was left its mark, and it's meaningful to us.  Perhaps it's meaningful to another as well.  In any case they are a narrative to our point of view.  We wish to be seen and heard.  A story is like a piece of clothing for our deeper emotions - the ones that might be too raw for direct exposure.

That being said, I think that telling our stories to come to grips with them in therapy is more like an entry strategy.  To deepen the process, the therapist needs to bring awareness to how the story is told, and move away from the content.  What happened is not nearly as interesting, as how the story teller experiences it in the present.  The story may need to be left behind to attend to real time experience, because change cannot happen in the past, only in our perception of it. 

I keep coming back to gatherings in my mind - times spent sitting in circles where stories arise.  Images of campfires and beer halls, yurts and dorm rooms, tables set with food or games, park benches, train cars - everywhere we go, our stories can tell others not only where we've been and what we've experienced, but also something about how we've experienced, our perspective.  This is not like therapy where we need to step back into some meta level to bring the underlying dynamics to awareness, but it does reveal much to those who care to pay attention.  Even if the story isn't one we personally experienced, it will still tell the listener more about us than a list of census facts would. 

Is it important to tell one's story?  I think so.  I don't often want to be around people who don't want to hear my story, and I may not trust them as easily, if they have none to tell.  These are generalizations of course, and exceptions apply, but truly - a story is like an opening into some part of another's world.  So when I hear a story, and another story arises, and when I tell that story, another arises in the other, the chain of connections bonds us into relatedness.  We can become part of the same story - at least for a while.