Story Coaching with Ryan Stroup
Maybe you’ve learned to get through life pretty well, but you know there has to be more than just getting through it.
Or maybe things are falling apart, and you’re stuck repeating the same patterns that keep making life difficult.
Avoiding what is hard can cost us a lot. Freedom is no longer being ruled by the ways we try to avoid it.
Sometimes what gets in the way has been there for a long time. Most of us learned ways of surviving long before we knew what we were doing. We are created for relationship, and when we are young, staying connected to the people we depend on matters a lot. So, we learn what keeps us close, what gets us hurt, what feelings are safe, and what parts of ourselves we need to keep hidden.
At one time those ways of relating made a lot of sense, but eventually they can become the very things that are keeping us trapped.
Both Are True
You can love your parents and still tell the truth about how they hurt you. You can understand the wounds they carried without excusing what they did with them.
Loyalty can make this hard. Telling the truth about someone we love can feel like betrayal.
It isn’t.
Often there is more to the story than we have been able to see which is why doing this work with a trained guide is crucial.
Faith And Story
My Christian faith shapes the way I understand this work. I believe the Bible is true. I also believe we need to tell the whole truth about the lives we have actually lived.
God doesn’t need us to minimize pain, anger or hard questions to protect His goodness. We can be honest about what happened and remain in relationship with Him. I’ve come to understand that kind of honesty as worship. Worship in spirit and in truth.
God is the author of our stories, and He authors some pretty wild stories. Scripture is full of lives that take turns no one saw coming.
You don’t need to share my faith to work with me. If faith matters to you, there is room to bring all of it here.
What This Looks Like
You write about a specific moment from your life and send it to me before our meeting.
During our meeting, you’ll be invited to read it aloud. Then we slow down and engage it with curiosity and kindness.
We are not digging around looking for trauma. We are paying attention to the story that is already there.
Instead of asking “What is wrong with me?” we can start asking “What happened that made this make sense?”
That is a very different question.
About Me
I am probably not the person anyone would have expected to end up doing this work.
My dad was killed in an accident at work when I was 15. Two years later I became a dad myself. I barely finished high school, and there was plenty of drinking, drugs and partying throughout a significant portion of my life. Straight out of high school I went into construction and spent years underground building tunnels.
Later I walked away from my career as a tunnel laborer and became a stay-at-home dad and homeschool educator to my two daughters. Eventually my own wild story led me to the Allender Center, Narrative Focused Trauma Care training and now sitting with other people as they engage their stories.
I don’t think one chapter cancels out another. The tunnel laborer is still part of me. So is the teenage dad and the guy who made choices he regrets. So is the husband, father, homeschool educator and coach I have become.
They all belong. And put together with the training I have received they have formed a way of engaging stories that is gentle but not afraid to enter the hardest places with you.
Our stories have shaped us. They don’t have to limit who we become.
