How Storytelling Informs Relationships
Personal Perspective: A segue to understanding complexity.
Updated April 14, 2026 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
“Like the heads of the mythological Hydra, the crises are many now…much like chopping off the Hydra’s heads, the resulting solutions that do not address the complexity seem to generate more consequences.” —Nora Bateson Complexity is the ability to perceive multiple perspectives and contexts. Its origin is from the Latin plexus, meaning "interwoven." It creates a segue into understanding what anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed was the source of the world's major problems: the result of "the difference between how nature works and the way people think."
My sense of complexity is that it offers a kaleidoscope of mutual sharing, mixing our stories and contexts to generate an acceptance of our interdependency with each other and our world. It is the basis for sustaining what is between our relationships and for resolving conflicts.
Here is my story of growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, a densely populated red-brick factory town in a valley, surrounded by a river and a Great Falls that powered its industry. All my relatives lived within walking distance, and my parents were born by the same midwife, a block away from the house where I lived. They all went to the same public school, church, and retail stores. My grandmother, my Noni, as I called her, was my favorite. She couldn't read or write, came from the area around Naples, Italy, when she was a young woman, yet she could go anywhere and then create something and nurture it.
Her pride was her garden, which was 25 by 25 feet in her backyard. It became a mini ecological masterpiece. She allowed it to grow and helped it maintain itself, becoming a collage of apricot, peach, and fig trees, interfacing in just the right places with a multitude of vegetables, flowers, and herbs. It amazed me how complex it was and how harmoniously it all worked. She would say, when entering her kitchen, "Let's do some gravy," teaching all the time, singing as the process emerged: "You know, you can't take the tomatoes out of the gravy. We are who we are and this garden of mine is very important. How do these vegetables like each other? What can they be to each other? The oregano, basil, the fish heads, the worms, and the bees all together. Where do they all end, and how do they help each other?" What I learned is that life is like a garden, a forest, a kitchen, or even the interconnected railroad tracks that ran behind her house. All are complex, all have a context evolving and communicating at their edges, the bark of a tree, the burrowing of worms, all emerging and interfacing with you and me. All these patterns are connecting and mingling by finding a way within similar ecologies; there's no name, no map, nothing, no territory, just relational creatures like us, side by side, beaming a message that something is no part of something else. Pulling things out of any system, for instance, only hides the expressions of interdependency and complexity. It is how we shape each other, how we combine, how we coalesce, and how we build our readiness to communicate about the emerging possibilities that are unseen but never unheard.
It is the process of patterns connecting that widens our understanding of conflict, which is being stuck in this context of multiple contexts. It is, however, the knowing that hope is the weirdness, the wildness of seeing things that no one else sees, which is the phenomenon we are all part of. Here is a visualization exercise that helps to understand complexity: Close your eyes and visualize a situation or conflict you recently had where you got stuck in trying to make a difference that really matters. Imagine you have a built-in lens for zooming in and out. Start by doing some “coherent breathing,” developed by Stephen Elliott, to soothe our vagus nerve , the nerve of compassion and security (a six-second inhale, and a six-second exhale with a positive thought). Now, think about what barriers or difficulties you had in making a difference in that situation.
Then open your eyes gently, sit comfortably, looking straight ahead. After a few more coherent breaths, still looking straight ahead without moving your eyes, simultaneously see the walls that surround you, still looking straight ahead, see the ceiling, and then the floor. After a few moments, still looking straight ahead, further widen your lens to include all that is around you, including colleagues and friends. Now that you know you are in a safe place, close your eyes and, with your mind's eye, visualize your home and, even wider, your community. Dwell on this view, feeling the nuances of what is appearing.
Now expand this view even further to include the outside world, with all that is happening and all that it entails at this moment. Again, pause and use all your senses to accept whatever arises from your subconscious , especially that place in between you and your relationships. Now, when you are ready, open your eyes and use all your senses to revisit your original situation or conflict, pause and savor that liminal space for a few minutes, then begin a story about how you could have and can begin making a difference when you had that conflict. Don’t be afraid of creating stories to heal and learn from each other. Ursula K. Le Guin believed: "In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison, and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle." Keep a journal of your responses and insights for your personal use or share them mutually with others through a give-and-take dialogue. Remember, collaboration and harmony start with what emerges within those spaces between us.
Prompts to help create possibilities to better understand complexity
Describe how your communication style and your friendships may not have evolved in the way that you hope they will have. How can a wider perspective help you in expressing yourself and expanding your friendships? What are some of the causes that may hinder you from experiencing mutual learning with others? What stories can you share with others that stay true to your emotional traits and unique qualities regarding your needs, concerns, and ways to be sensitive to the needs of others? Think of improvisational ways you can create contexts that enhance your sense of complexity? What barriers would you encounter in respecting complexity, and how can you avoid them? Imagine you are volleying with another in a very important moment of communication. What would you need to keep the conversation going in a way that creates a win-win moment? How would you communicate to another person the need to maintain a collaborative environment? How would being more aware of complexity affect your emotional and physical well-being?
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Kenneth Silvestri, Ed.D. is a systemic psychotherapist and author of A Wider Lens: How to See Your Life Differently .
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.