Story Work with Chris Malone
A guide to what story work is, how I offer narrative-focused trauma care, and what you can expect if we work together.
Who I Am
My name is Chris Malone. I am a pastoral counselor and story coach whose work is centered on helping people engage their stories with honesty, courage, and compassion. My approach is deeply shaped by Christian faith, trauma-informed care, and narrative-focused healing.
My own life has not been untouched by suffering. I do not come to this work as a detached expert, but as someone who has had to wrestle with pain, loss, confusion, and the long, often nonlinear journey of healing. My life has included personal trauma, family hardship, grief, profound disruption, and experiences that required me to face how suffering shapes the heart, the body, relationships, and one’s sense of God.
Because of my own story, I care deeply about creating a space where people are not reduced to symptoms, shame, or spiritual slogans. I want to help people tell the truth about what happened, how it affected them, what they came to believe in the aftermath, and what God may be inviting them toward now.
My Training and Formation
My work is informed by narrative-focused trauma care, pastoral counseling, story work, and faith-based soul care. I draw especially from approaches that take seriously the impact of trauma on identity, attachment, embodiment, desire, shame, and one’s experience of God.
My formation includes trauma-informed story work that pays attention not only to events, but also to interpretation, meaning, relational wounds, protective strategies, and the long arc of healing. I work from a framework that recognizes that people are shaped by both what happened to them and what was absent when they most needed care, protection, delight, advocacy, and wise presence.
I am especially shaped by Christian frameworks of healing that do not deny suffering and do not rush people to closure. My understanding of care is rooted in the conviction that people bear the image of God, that trauma profoundly distorts how a person experiences themselves and others, and that healing often involves slow, courageous re-engagement with one’s story in the presence of safety, compassion, and truth.
In addition to formal training, my work has been deeply formed by years of pastoral care, spiritual reflection, walking with hurting people, and doing my own ongoing story work. I do not believe we can wisely invite others into places we refuse to enter ourselves. For that reason, I seek to do this work with humility, reverence, and integrity.
What Story Work Is
Story work is a guided process of engaging the significant stories that have shaped your life so that you can better understand how those experiences continue to affect your present relationships, patterns, emotions, body, choices, and view of God.
At its core, story work begins with the belief that human beings are storied people. We do not simply live through events; we interpret them. We draw conclusions. We make vows. We develop survival strategies. We adopt roles. We protect ourselves. We hide. We strive. We numb. We fear. We long. Over time, these responses can become deeply ingrained, often operating beneath conscious awareness.
Story work helps bring these dynamics into the light. It is not simply “talking about the past.” It is a careful, structured, compassionate engagement with meaningful moments in your life so that what has been hidden, fragmented, minimized, or misnamed can be more honestly understood.
We explore not only what happened, but also what it felt like, what you needed but did not receive, what you learned about yourself, others, and God, how you adapted in order to survive, where those adaptations still show up now, and what restoration, grieving, repentance, forgiveness, embodiment, and integration may look like.
Story work is not about blaming everyone in your life or reliving pain for its own sake. It is about truth-telling, grieving what was lost, naming what was distorted, recognizing how you learned to survive, and opening space for new freedom and deeper integrity.
What I Mean by Trauma
When I use the word trauma, I am not only referring to dramatic or catastrophic events, though those certainly matter. Trauma can also involve chronic neglect, emotional misattunement, spiritual harm, deep loneliness, shame, exposure to chaos, betrayal, abandonment, family dysfunction, or repeatedly having to carry more than a child or adult should have had to carry alone.
Sometimes trauma is obvious. Sometimes it is subtle. Sometimes people tell me, “Nothing that bad happened,” yet their story reveals profound loneliness, fear, invisibility, responsibility, confusion, or violation. Trauma is not measured only by the size of the event, but by its impact on the person, especially when there was not enough safety, support, protection, or repair.
This means story work is not only for people with one clearly identifiable “big trauma.” It is also for people whose lives were shaped by a thousand smaller injuries, absences, humiliations, or unmet longings that accumulated over time.
How I Do Story Work
My approach is relational, trauma-informed, faith-aware, and paced with care.
I do not force disclosure. I do not pressure clients to go faster than their system can tolerate. I do not assume that insight alone is enough. I do not use simplistic spiritual answers to bypass grief, anger, fear, or confusion. I believe healing requires both honesty and safety.
1. Building safety and trust
Before deeper story engagement, we establish a relational foundation. This includes getting to know your present concerns, your goals, your history, your pace, and the ways your system may already be signaling stress or overload.
2. Mapping your story
We begin identifying important themes, events, seasons, wounds, losses, relationships, and recurring patterns. This often includes a story catalog or timeline that helps us notice where pain and protective strategies began to take shape.
3. Entering specific stories
Rather than staying only in summary form, we often move into particular stories and moments. Clients are invited to write or tell stories in a narrative way, with attention to setting, characters, tension, feelings, body responses, desires, and meaning.
4. Naming impact and adaptations
We explore what those moments taught you. What did you come to believe about yourself? What roles did you adopt? How did you learn to stay safe? What parts of you had to go underground?
5. Connecting the past to the present
A major part of story work is seeing how earlier wounds still shape present-day life, including relationship struggles, emotional reactivity, compulsive behaviors, withdrawal, perfectionism, people-pleasing, sexual struggles, numbness, self-condemnation, fear of conflict, or chronic shame.
6. Grieving, truth-telling, and integration
As the story becomes clearer, clients are often able to grieve more honestly, feel more compassion for themselves, recognize distortions they have lived under, and begin integrating parts of themselves that have long been fragmented or hidden.
Healing does not mean erasing the past. It means that the past loses some of its power to define the present. It means greater freedom, deeper self-awareness, more grounded choices, more honest relationships, and a growing ability to live from truth rather than old survival strategies.
How I Provide Trauma Care
The way I provide trauma care matters as much as the content we discuss.
I aim to offer care that is steady, respectful, attentive, and grounded. My work is shaped by several commitments:
- I honor pace. I do not believe people heal through force. Trauma often involved having too much happen too fast, without enough support or choice. Because of that, we move with care, not hurry.
- I pay attention to the whole person. Trauma affects more than thoughts. It affects the body, emotions, imagination, relationships, desire, memory, and spiritual life. I listen for all of those layers.
- I care about meaning, not just behavior. Many people come because of present struggles, but I do not treat those struggles as isolated problems. I want to understand what they mean and how they emerged in the context of your story.
- I resist shame. I work to create a space where people can tell the truth without being humiliated. That does not mean I avoid hard things. It means that honesty happens in the context of dignity.
- I do not spiritually bypass pain. I believe faith can hold sorrow, protest, confusion, longing, and unanswered questions. I do not rush people to forgiveness, certainty, gratitude, or resolution before their story has been genuinely honored.
- I welcome complexity. People are rarely only victims or only agents. Many have been wounded and have also wounded others. Story work makes room for both grief and responsibility.
- I work toward integration, not performance. The goal is not to help you look healed, sound spiritual, or manage appearances. The goal is deeper congruence: that your inner world and outer life become more aligned, honest, grounded, and free.
What Sessions Tend to Feel Like
Sessions are conversational, focused, and reflective. Depending on the stage of our work, a session may include present-life reflection, story exploration, questions about meaning and impact, guided attention to what is happening internally, and discussion of how a particular pattern or struggle connects to earlier experiences.
At times I may ask you to write stories between sessions, reflect on prompts, notice patterns in daily life, or pay attention to how your body and emotions respond in certain situations. This is not busywork. It is part of helping the deeper story come into view.
Clients often find that our work feels different from ordinary conversation because we are not just discussing events. We are slowing down enough to notice the deeper currents beneath them.
Expected Outcomes
Story work is not magic, and I do not promise quick transformation. Healing is rarely linear. At the same time, I have seen meaningful change happen when people engage their stories with courage and consistency.
Greater self-understanding
You begin to see more clearly why you respond as you do, what shaped your patterns, and how your survival strategies developed.
Reduced shame
As the story is understood in context, people often experience more compassion for themselves and less self-contempt.
Better awareness of triggers and patterns
You become more able to recognize when old wounds are being activated and why certain situations feel disproportionately intense.
Increased emotional honesty
You become more able to name sadness, anger, fear, desire, grief, and longing rather than living only from numbness, avoidance, or overcontrol.
Greater freedom in relationships
As you understand your story more deeply, you may become less reactive, less guarded, more honest, and more capable of healthy connection, boundaries, repair, and vulnerability.
A more grounded sense of identity
Many clients begin to disentangle who they are from what happened to them, what others demanded of them, or what shame taught them to believe.
Movement toward shalom. I often think in terms of shalom: the wholeness, peace, and rightness for which we were created. Our stories include beauty, rupture, longing, and the search for restoration. Story work helps people name where shalom was shattered, how they have learned to live in the aftermath, and what it may mean to seek restoration with honesty and hope.
What Story Work Is Not
It may also be helpful to clarify what this work is not.
- Story work is not casual advice-giving.
- It is not motivational coaching detached from suffering.
- It is not mere venting.
- It is not about blaming your past for everything in the present.
- It is not a quick fix.
- It is not forced vulnerability.
- It is not spiritual performance.
- It is not behavior management alone.
It is careful, courageous engagement with the truth of your story for the sake of healing, integrity, and restored freedom.
Who This Work Is For
This work may be a good fit for you if:
- you want to understand how your past still affects your present
- you feel stuck in recurring patterns and want to understand the deeper roots
- you are ready for thoughtful, honest reflection rather than surface-level solutions
- you sense that grief, trauma, shame, loneliness, or relational wounds have shaped your life
- you want faith to be part of the process, but not used to silence your pain
- you are willing to engage story slowly and sincerely
When Other Support May Also Be Needed
There are times when story work is best complemented by other forms of support, including licensed mental health care, medical care, psychiatric care, couples counseling, addiction treatment, or crisis care. When appropriate, I may encourage clients to seek additional support alongside our work.
My desire is not to do everything, but to offer the kind of care I am called and equipped to provide with integrity.
Why I Do This Work
I do this work because I believe people’s stories matter. I believe many people have spent years surviving without ever being deeply seen. I believe pain that is ignored or minimized does not simply disappear; it often continues to shape identity, desire, relationships, and the experience of God.
I also believe healing is possible. Not easy. Not instant. Not tidy. But real.
I have seen that when people are given wise presence, careful questions, permission to tell the truth, and a framework for understanding their story, something begins to shift. Shame loosens. Clarity grows. Compassion deepens. Long-buried grief finds language. Protective strategies become more visible. And people begin to live with greater freedom, courage, and wholeness.
That is the work I want to offer.
If you are considering working with me, I want you to know that I take this process seriously. Story work is sacred ground. It requires courage from you and care from me. My aim is to offer a space where your life can be engaged with honesty, dignity, and hope.
If, after reading this, you sense that this approach resonates with where you are and what you need, I would be honored to walk with you.