ReStorying America: Healing Narrative Wounds in Families, Communities, and Organizations (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798249257279)

David Boje has spent fifty years studying how stories hold people together - and how they tear families, communities, and nations apart. A Vietnam veteran, cancer survivor, and world leader in organizational storytelling, he lives on a ranch in New Mexico where his horses remind him daily that alignment beats argument every time.

Restorying America follows David and Wilma - a composite of dozens of real people whose life-pathways through America look nothing like his - on a journey into families, communities, and organizations in deep conflict. Not to argue. Not to diagnose. Stop winning the argument, Start Changing the story.

Through together-listening practices, mirroring exercises, and story-listening circles, this book trains volunteers to go where the trouble is and offer something no political argument can: a way to restory who we are to one another. Every chapter includes discussion questions and experiential exercises. This is not a book you read. It is a book you do. America divided cannot stand. But not along the old fault lines of us versus them - that framing is the problem.

Families that once gathered for Thanksgiving now spend fifty fewer minutes together because the partisan gap between their zip codes makes sitting at the same table feel like a moral betrayal. One in two American adults is estranged from at least one close relative. One in five of those estrangements is tied directly to political differences that have intensified over the last fifty years. Fewer than two percent of voters believe the other side understands them at all.

These are not just numbers. These are mothers who no longer call their sons. Brothers who cannot be in the same room. Hospital staff split into opposing factions. Small towns where school board meetings erupt into shouting matches that end with families leaving the community entirely.

David Boje knows what this is. He has studied it for fifty years. This is a static linear narrative problem - a story-architecture that cherry-picks everything to fit a beginning-middle-end script of heroes and villains, and leaves the Little Wow Moments as untold stories on the cutting room floor. These linear narrative problems require dynamic storying solutions: together-listening without blame, judgment, or shame.

Restorying America follows David and Wilma - a composite of dozens of real Americans whose life-pathways look nothing like his - into families, communities, and organizations in deep conflict. Through the book's Restorying Protocol, together-listening practices, mirroring exercises, and story-listening circles, readers learn not just to understand the methodology but to use it - as trained volunteers who go where the trouble is and offer something no political argument ever can: a way to restory who we are to one another.

Every chapter includes discussion questions and experiential exercises. This is not a book about healing. It is a field guide for healing - for anyone brave enough to sit at the table when the easy thing would be to walk away.