By Shameka Poetry Thomas, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, October 5, 2021
My grandmother was a traditional healer and a medicine-woman in Georgia’s rural South. Although I grew up in Miami’s Opa-Locka (a small urban neighborhood tucked between Miami-Gardens and the cusp of Hialeah / Little Havana), I spent most summers near middle Georgia’s farmland, listening to my grandmother. I observed how grandmother, who did not have a Ph.D., gathered Black women in circles. She described the process of listening to Black women’s pregnancies, births, and wellness experiences as “chitchatting and holding space.”
Learning how to ‘hold space’ is what draws me to narrative medicine. My first dose of learning how to conduct narrative medicine, I suppose, came from my grandmother. This methodology (before I knew it was such) was simply understood as the process of sitting in kitchens and beauty salons in the South—just listening. During childhood, I was merely curious about how Black women described their pregnancies, births, and reproductive health—from their side of the story. Thus, when it came to reproductive health, my grandmother taught me a powerful tool: how to “hold space” for people’s narratives.
What is narrative medicine and holding space?
As an early-career scientific investigator and medical sociologist, my prior work focused on holding space for the lived-experience of Black women’s pregnancy and birth at the clinical encounter via narrative medicine. Holding space, the keystone of my approach to narrative medicine, is defined as the ability to center the lived-experience via the practice of compassion and stillness, without blame, shame, or judgement. Narrative medicine1, thus, focuses on the experiential worlds of patients and operates from the basic principle that patients are individuals, rather than cases or variables. Patients, in this sense, can 1) interpret their own health (and illness) experiences; 2) define their own approaches of wellness, 3) communicate their perceptions of treatment, and 4) evaluate their own perspectives of outcomes inside and outside of clinical encounters. Researchers who employ narrative medicine aim to resurrect the stories of patients who have been marginalized by centering the lived-experience as legitimate data and findings.
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