LIFE STORY HEALING
Life Story Healing · 2017 · Web design, Build · Visit the site →
A therapeutic practice with a great deal to say and nowhere for people to read it quietly, on their own, before they were ready to pick up a phone.
Life Story Healing was founded by Ann Rainey, LPC, around a therapeutic intervention called Reconstruction — work that supports healing from trauma and shame connected to a person’s life story. As Ann put it, the passion of Reconstruction is helping people become who they really are.
The practice served two audiences at once: people looking for a way to tell their own stories and find healing in the telling, and therapists working in action and experiential modalities — including students of Sharon Cruse — who wanted to connect with one another.
The work existed almost entirely in person: in workshops, in sessions, on paper, in a network of practitioners who mostly knew each other already. There was nothing online.
For this kind of practice that is a real barrier, and not a technical one. Someone considering trauma work rarely starts by calling a stranger. They start by reading, quietly and at their own pace, sometimes for months, and deciding whether the person on the other end sounds like someone they could talk to. Without a site, that first step did not exist. The professional network had the same problem in a different shape: no shared place to point people or find each other.
We built the site on WordPress specifically so we would not be a bottleneck. Personal stories, resources, a bibliography, professional materials and events all needed to be added over time by the people doing the work, not routed through us every time.
We structured it around the three things it actually had to do — Healing, Storytelling and Connecting — rather than around an org chart, and gave the personal stories real prominence. In work like this the testimony of people who have been through it is the most persuasive material there is, and burying it three levels down would have been a mistake.
Calm, plain and unhurried. Comfortable to read at length, with nothing clever competing for attention.
The subject matter set the constraints. Somebody arriving at this site may be having a difficult day, and the last thing they need is a design being interesting at them. Restraint was the entire brief.
A straightforward WordPress build with hosting from us and editing from them — the split that makes sense when a client has a steady flow of material and no interest in learning a deployment process.
The practice has since wound down and the site is retired. We keep an archived copy so the work is not simply gone, though it is closed to search engines.
The practice became findable and, more importantly, readable — by exactly the people least likely to make first contact by telephone. Resources, reading and other people’s stories were all available to someone still working out whether this was for them.
The therapist network got somewhere to gather that was not dependent on anyone’s mailing list. The site is retired now, but it did the job for as long as the practice needed it to.
If any of this sounds like your situation, have a look at how we work, or get in touch.
