# How to Tell a Recovery Story ‘Professionally’? Issues Related to the Transformation of Personal Stories During a Training for Becoming a Peer Support Worker

## TL;DR

This paper explores how peer support workers learn to professionally share their personal recovery stories during training.

## Contribution

The study identifies key themes in how personal recovery stories are transformed during professional training for peer support work.

## Key findings

- Training courses socialize participants in unwritten rules for crafting recovery stories.
- Seven main themes emerged, including emotion control and strategic storytelling.
- Stories without happy endings still hold dignity and social value.

## Abstract

Sharing narratives about recovery is a central activity in peer support work. Researchers have so far investigated many issues related to recovery narratives, but have paid no attention to how the building and sharing of one's story are modified during training courses. This study examines the beliefs of participants in the first national training to become Peer Support Worker (PSW), funded by the Italian Ministry of Health in 2022–23, regarding how to craft their recovery story to make it ‘professional’.

16 PSWs were interviewed at the end of the course. Implicit theories and beliefs were the focus of the semi‐structured interviews. Answers were transcribed and analysed through thematic analysis.

The training represents a decisive moment for socialising the ‘unwritten rules’ about how to build and tell personal experiences. Seven main themes emerged: the story‐sharing as the most important tool to understand what happened, as a ‘passage’ of status that changes the feeling between the person and the story through the presence of others, the need for a method for structuring the story, the emotion control as prerequisite for maintaining the right distance between one's story and the user's story—not imposing oneself on the other's experience, the relevance of acting as strategic story director, accepting stories without happy ending and story‐sharing for cultural and social change. Results have been discussed with the contribution of PSW, highlighting the potentials and risks.

Training should develop competencies in expressing the story without standardising it, thereby avoiding the reification of the recovery journey into a single version. Story‐sharing should not be considered merely as the enactment of a favourable recovery journey; even stories that do not have a happy ending, or that do not adhere to the canons of the ‘recovery genre’, have dignity and social utility. In a nutshell, the PSW must be helped in becoming the filmmaker of the story rather than the performer of a static script.

The PSWs involved played a fundamental role in participating actively by deciding to make available their narratives, reading the results and commenting on them.