WHY TELLING YOUR MOTHER’S STORY BUILDS EMPATHY

More than a decade ago, I had the great fortune of meeting Philip Tobias, whose work fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the human species, not only anatomically, but behaviorally. Tobias insisted that to understand what humans are, we must understand what humans do to survive. I asked him how far back storytelling went in human history. I speculated that perhaps it began around thirty-five thousand years ago, with the cave paintings at Chauvet Cave.

He laughed. 

Storytelling, he said, goes back millions of years, to the very dawn of humanity. Before we humans could speak, we could sing. We mimicked birds, wind, footsteps, and danger. Sound preceded language. And storytelling emerged not as art, but as necessity. We had to communicate how to hunt, how to give birth, how to raise children, how to avoid predators. Storytelling was not optional; it was a survival function. Those who could transmit knowledge endured. Those who could not disappeared.

This insight reframes everything.

When I first shared the idea of the World Mother Storytelling Project with Mark Ball, artistic director  at the Southbank Centre in London, he grasped the connection immediately. What we urgently need right now  is more empathy.”

Mark Ball understood, intuitively and structurally, that mother storytelling is not a niche artistic exercise or a personal indulgence. It is a direct intervention in how humans learn to see one another. To tell a mother’s story is to practice perspective-taking at its most intimate level, and intimacy is where empathy is trained.

At the heart of the World Mother Storytelling Project lies a deceptively simple premise: telling your mother’s story builds empathy. But seen through Tobias’s lens, this is not a sentimental claim. It is an evolutionary one. Empathy is not a luxury emotion; it is a technology for cooperation. And cooperation is how our species survived.

When we tell our mother’s story we interrupt the brain’s default egocentrism. We stop relating to our mothers merely as functions in our own narrative and begin to reconstruct them as full human beings shaped by history, culture, constraint, and chance. We ask destabilizing questions: Who was she before she was my mother? What forces shaped her choices? What did she carry that she never spoke about?

This act mirrors humanity’s earliest storytelling impulse: to step outside oneself long enough to ensure continuity. Storytelling reorganizes memory, reveals causality, and replaces judgment with understanding. It does not erase pain; it contextualizes it.

Listening is equally central. In early human groups, to be heard was to be recognized as belonging. Within the World Mother Storytelling Project, listening is treated as a civic act, an act of respect that allows silence to do meaningful work. When stories are truly heard, something softens. Judgment loses urgency. Empathy emerges not as agreement, but as comprehension.

This matters now more than ever. We are living at a moment when aggression and destruction dominate global systems. By any evolutionary measure, this suggests a malfunction in our survival function. If storytelling once helped us stay alive, then our failure to listen deeply and  empathetically may be part of what now threatens us.

To tell and listen to stories that cultivate empathy is an act of evolutionary participation. We are reinforcing the very capacity that allowed our species to endure.

That response echoes Tobias’s insight across millennia. Storytelling is not decoration. It is infrastructure. And when we tell our mothers’ stories—when we listen long enough for their humanity to emerge—we are not only honoring the past. We are actively shaping the future of the human species.