Dallas BraggFormer crystal methamphetamine user, I help men who have sex with men break free from the addictive patterns associated with Chemsex. Currently expanding my expertise by seeking to become a Certified

Story Telling Healing After Meth

8 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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1:22

In this monologue, the speaker draws on storytelling theory to suggest that every secondary character in a narrative reflects a facet of the protagonist—villains embody the protagonist's deepest fears, friends mirror aspects of their sexuality, and so on. Using the example of Star Wars, where the antagonist is the hero’s father and represents what the hero does not wish to become, the speaker argues that stories deliberately make the main character likable, whereas they prefer narratives with more morally ambiguous, realistic characters. They then invite listeners to apply this narrative lens to their own lives, asking what each person in their circle reflects about themselves, not in a solipsistic way but as a mirror of personal traits and unresolved issues.

Chapters

There's another thing I learned from studying storytelling as well, which I think does apply to your life. And is it just another way maybe to reframe how you're living your life, which is that in any film or novel that you've read, all of the characters are reflecting a facet of the main character. So the villain is the worst aspects or the thing that the main character, the protagonist fears. being perhaps doesn't want to turn into. Um, you know, like in Star Wars, the villain, the antagonist, turns out to actually literally be his father and is everything he doesn't want to be. Yeah, yeah. But is he offered, do you want to, you know, you can, you can join me, you can be like this. And that story's laid very clear. And then, um, you know, the slutty best friend or whatever is the— reflect the sexuality of the main character. So much work is done in stories to make sure the main character's likable and relatable. I try to like push against that a bit in my stories, 'cause I always love, I love films and books and things where the characters are quite hard to like and they feel much more real. They don't feel sanitized. That's something when you think of your own life, when you think, how does everybody in my life reflect who I am? Yeah. Reflect a side of me, not in a solipsistic way of like, I'm the only real person, everyone else is a sort of a reflection, but what are they reflecting in you? What do they represent in your life?