Michael Patrick MacDonald

The Rest of the Story: Transforming Trauma to Voice, Agency, and Leadership

What we want to do is give our fellow survivors the opportunity to use storytelling to transform trauma and find voice – which ultimately means finding agency. When we, as survivors, do that, we are in charge of the rest of the story, the "what next?" -Michael Patrick MacDonald

The Rest of the Story is a trauma-informed community-based storytelling curriculum, designed to help participants transform trauma to voice, agency, and leadership through storytelling and writing. In addition, the curriculum has been utilized for community-building efforts aimed at bridging differences or simply to break down the silos within community organizing efforts. The curriculum is a five-session process, meeting for 2 to 2 ½ hours once a week, including pre-session food and post-session processing for those who need it.

The Rest of the Story is about a process first and foremost. Using Restorative Justice Circle process-style prompts, the experience can be therapeutic for groups with specific community trauma in common. In addition, the restorative process can serve to connect groups and individuals working toward common social justice and community-building goals. In this way, The Rest of the Story is rooted in age-old Mutual Aid-style grassroots organizing, wherein individuals gravitate to each other around a particular need or issue, find out that they are not alone (that “this is bigger than me”), and work collectively toward a greater goal of community and systemic change alongside personal agency and healing.

Invariably each cohort produces a collection of stories, but each individual in a cohort owns their story. It is crucial to the process that each participant feel in charge of their story and any resulting piece of writing, and that each is ultimately in charge of what shall be done with their piece. Throughout sessions, sharing is always optional, our golden rule being Always invitation, never invasion. Always opportunity, never demand. Invariably, a safe space for sharing and listening is developed and maintained collectively.

A cohort may decide what they would like to do with the collective’s stories, given the permission of each participant. Many groups have produced anthologies and storytelling events as well as public art exhibitions to serve the mission of the collective vis a vis the particular narrative a group wishes to project to the world.

The Rest of the Story works within a trauma-informed framework, prioritizing safety first in the remembering and reconstructing of one’s personal narrative. Facilitators emphasize the need for the storyteller to remain in charge of one’s story at all stages, from remembrance to ultimate decisions about whether one will share their story, and where, when, and how that sharing might happen.  

The Rest of the Story was created by Michael Patrick MacDonald, a bestselling author of the memoirs, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie and Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. MacDonald’s thirty-four years of work—as a community organizer, Restorative Justice practitioner and writer—has always been anchored in his lived experience of poverty and personal loss to violence, the drug trade, and incarceration while growing up in South Boston’s housing projects. Having learned to transform his own trauma to voice and agency through trauma-informed, survivor-led community organizing and having ultimately experienced the redemptive power of memoir-writing, he has developed this course to share the personal and community value of memory-work and story sharing.

“There is deep power in the healing capacity of story sharing and writing but it must be done carefully to be fully actualized. Michael Patrick MacDonald’s use of trauma-informed restorative justice practices, alongside his brilliant ability to help shape narrative, is empowering and healing. This work is life changing, both for individuals and their communities. There is freedom in truth; Michael has developed an extraordinary process to lead people to it.” - Jennifer F. Havens, MD, Chair, Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine; Director of Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health, NYC Health and Hospitals.

Three Parts—from Cohort to action-oriented Supergroup to Facilitator Training:

The Rest of the Story comes in three parts. Part One is the five-week cohort. Each week, participants meet for a session, arriving for an optional meal to settle in and then participating in a story sharing process using the Restorative model (always invitation, never invasion, always the right to pass). During the session, MPM uses prompts to inspire storysharing on and off the page. Each prompt has safety-first built into it, allowing a participant to go where they feel capable of going as well as where they perhaps want or need to go, always checking in with themself for safety. Attention to somatic response is encouraged throughout the process. Participants are consistently  reminded that they are in charge of where they go in story, how they go, and with whom they will share. Each session begins and ends, as taught to MacDonald by indigenous Restorative Justice practitioners, in a good way. That means that we take all the time we need to “circle-in” and to “circle-out,” sitting with anything that comes up.

Groups may be satisfied to only undergo the above cohort process–as a one-time-experience aimed at community building for a developing group, or as an ongoing project with repeated twice-annual cohorts aimed at building and sustaining coalitions. The below, Part Two and Part Three, are optional programs beyond the five-week cohort. Part Two, the monthly Supergroup, has thus far been consistently desired by participants in the five-week cohort. Part Three, Training of future TRS Facilitators, will sometimes be used by organizations such as The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in Boston and Participation and Practice of Rights in the North of Ireland who wish to grow the facilitation and leadership capacity of their participants.

Part Two of The Rest of the Story: monthly “Supergroup” meetings with alum from past cohorts. The supergroup acts as a coalition working toward whatever public expression or action a group wants to work toward. Past examples have included an anthology of stories (again, only involving those who choose to publish, whether named or anonymous), storytelling events where participants do readings in the locale of their choice, and the creation of prominently displayed visual art & story exhibitions, whether in the halls of power or at grassroots community centers aimed at raising awareness on community issues and/or strengths. In Supergroup phase, TRS shepherds groups toward collective visions and edits individual stories in one-on-one sessions with each storyteller, always maintaining the individual’s voice and agency in the process. Beyond that, TRS assists in helping to implement the logistics of the project, whether an anthology book or a public visual display. While Part One –the curriculum for a cohort with a particular affinity and mission—ought to happen in-person, Part Two, the Supergroup, can happen in monthly Zoom sessions.

Part Three of the program is a Training of Facilitators. Organizations might choose to continue their own coalition-building through storytelling, developing facilitators of future cohorts of The Rest of the Story. In this phase Michael Patrick MacDonald will train alumni of past cohorts in trauma-informed facilitation. Alumni will then be certified to facilitate The Rest of the Story cohorts in their own geographic communities and/or affinity groups (e.g. survivors of particular trauma, formerly incarcerated individuals, youth workers, LGBTQIA+ groups, refugee and asylum seeker groups, etc.). In this way, The Rest of the Story can serve the purpose of developing trauma-informed restorative communities and/or coalitions and movements. This training of facilitators is also five-sessions which can be done in person or via Zoom. All participants should be graduates of a TRS cohort (Part 1).

Where The Rest of the Story has been implemented:

The Rest of the Story was piloted in 2014 at Crittenton Women’s Union (now EMPath) with Greater Boston women transitioning out of abuse and poverty. Since then, the curriculum was continuously housed and implemented at the Louis D Brown Peace Institute with survivors of homicide victims in Boston. In Ireland it has been implemented with cross-border “men’s sheds” in Fermanagh and Leitrim, as well as at Loughan House prison, an “open prison” in County Cavan. In 2019, as part of MacDonald’s Fulbright Scholar Award at Queen’s University, Belfast, The Rest of the Story was brought to Upper Springfield Road youth workers in West Belfast as well as to Participation and Practice of Rights, where mental health advocates (both providers as well as survivors with lived experience) have continuously used it as a mutual aid tool, assisting in building a mental health advocacy coalition called the New Script for Mental Health. The Rest of the Story has been adopted by the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, to develop a system-wide Parent Advisory Council from among parents of incarcerated youth. Most recently, TRS has been used with young leaders and youth workers in North Inner-City Dublin, a high-poverty area recently ravaged by organized crime and painkilling epidemics. All of these groups come together via Zoom for quarterly transatlantic storytelling events which provide a sense of global support, inspiration, and strategy sharing.

 “Too often, the lives of people who have been systemically impoverished and marginalized are dominated by a ‘single story’ constructed and told by dominant classes of people in media and policy-making positions. The Rest of the Story is ultimately about reclaiming our individual and community narratives—in all their nuances, multiplicities, and complexities—and the empowerment that comes from being in charge of our stories. When we are in charge of our own story, we are better equipped to transform, to healthfully integrate the difficulties and traumas of that story into our lives and into our work. Ultimately, we are able to use our individual story to connect with others in solidarity, and to build communities at the intersection of justice and healing.”          - Michael Patrick MacDonald