Everyone has his or her own unique life story to tell, and that story can be therapeutic for themselves and others.

This is the focus of narrative medicine, a field that has been gaining more reputation since its development in the last decade.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, a Lawrence poet and the current Kansas poet laureate, will teach a workshop this weekend on narrative medicine and how it can be used in people’s lives.

She calls narrative medicine “an emerging field which looks at the stories we tell about health and illness. It encourages patients to tell stories to their physicians and encourages medical professionals to listen to their stories. (It also) looks at how we tell our stories and how we can kind of change how we tell our stories … and understand them in new ways.”

Narrative medicine is mostly geared toward helping patients with chronic illnesses positively reconstruct their lives by telling their personal stories through writing. It also is for people wanting to improve aspects of their lives by reassessing the life story they are living out right now, Mirriam-Goldberg, says.

For instance, it could help someone wanting to lose weight.

“If you want to get in better shape and you start exercising regularly and you’ve never done that before, you are giving yourself a new life story,” she says. “I think you look at what story your life is living and how you can improve your health by looking at that life story.”

Physicians and other medical personnel can also learn from narrative medicine, Mirriam-Goldberg says.

“It gives them a chance to see more the person than the symptoms,” she says. “It gives them a different point of view.”

Mirriam-Goldberg, also an environmental activist, takes an even more expansive approach to narrative medicine and believes that it can go even deeper than human-to-human relationships.

“It also looks at how we tell our stories about where we live and how, when we have relationships with places, we also have stories about places,” she says. “What’s happening to the earth is happening to us — if we want to change our own story we have to change the environmental story.”

Mirriam-Goldberg is hoping to change lives with her weekend workshop.

“Come with an open mind and open heart and see what happens,” she says.