The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

As a clinical psychologist, I am often asked to identify what is wrong with someone.  While this can be valuable in certain circumstances, it may actually be more valuable to be able to say what is right with someone.  One of the things that has always intrigued me in the field of psychology is that two people can go through the same circumstances, witness the same horrible events, be victim to the same trauma yet have very different reactions and outcomes secondary to their shared experiences. 

All other things being equal, I think one of the main things that likely explains these differences in reactions and outcomes are the stories those two individuals tell themselves in reaction to their shared experience.  We all know the power a story we hear or read can have on us whether it be moving us to tears, motivating us to action, or scaring the bejesus out of us. 

While we tend to think of stories as things we hear from others or read, I believe that one way to think about how we view ourselves, others, and the world around us is best understood as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Our daily lives are filled with an almost endless inner monologue, running commentary, or thoughtful reflection on every waking moment of our days and nights.  Psychology has long held out the insight that our thoughts have a powerful impact on things such as our emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and views of ourselves, others, and the world around us. 

Our thoughts naturally turn into recurring themes that ultimately lead to the composition of stories that we repeatedly tell ourselves about ourselves, others, and the world around us.  These stories take on immense power and set our frame of reference for our views about us as individuals, others, and our environment. 

These stories can be positive and uplifting by telling a tale of us as competent and lovable individuals who navigate a world that is safe, responsive, able to meet our needs, and willing to grant our wishes and desires or these stories can be negative and depressing by telling a tale of us as incompetent and unlovable individuals who try to navigate a world that is unsafe, thwarting our needs at every turn, and unwilling to even entertain our wishes and desires.     

I also believe that the stories we tell ourselves operate at multiple levels.  At the most basic level, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, others, and the world around us can be broken into an Upper Story and a Lower Story.  Both levels of the story are important, but tension, angst, conflicts, and even pathology can result when the Upper Story and the Lower Story are not in sync, confused with one another, or we focus on one too much at the expense of the other.   

Our day to day, moment to moment existence can be referred to as the Lower Story.  This is the story told from the 5-foot 7-inch view, unless you are taller and then perhaps this is the story told from the 6-foot perspective.  In the lower story, we are dealing with daily things in the here and now – going to work or school each day, folding the laundry, fixing dinner (or trying to decide where to go for dinner), fighting a cold, picking up your cold medicine at the pharmacy, trying to get the kids to bed, and trying to remember that you wanted to wash your sheets this week.

The lower story tends to be linear and horizontal in nature.  Our lower story progresses linearly through time and is typically narrated by the running commentary of our inner voice on our day-to-day activities.  The narrative of our Lower Story is almost always in our conscious awareness and is readily accessible without much, if any, effort.  It may be rational, but many times can be irrational.         

The larger themes or arcs of our lives guided by our wants, wishes, desires, and values (whether we are aware of them or not) are the Upper Story.  The Upper Story is influenced by early life experiences of which we may not even be aware of or remember.  The themes of our Upper Story may be beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world around us that are unspoken or perhaps not even realized by us.      

This Upper Story is an idealized story, the story of who we believe our true self to be or, wish for our true self to be, or lie to ourselves about who our true self is.  The Upper Story is told from a view at 30,000 feet.  It is a view that is larger in scope, more vertically based, and more holistic in nature.  It also can be rational or irrational in nature.        

The Upper Story does not necessarily follow in a linear fashion and is often outside of our conscious awareness.  Meaningful effort and thought are often required of us to interact and be aware of our Upper Story. 

In the Upper Story we learn how to weave the individual day to day chapters of our Lower Story into the larger, grand plot of our Upper Story.  In the Upper Story we discover what the script our true self has written for us. 

The world around us presents us with data and events that we have to incorporate into our Upper and Lower stories.  As humans, we are hard-wired to find patterns everywhere and in everything, even when there aren’t any real patterns there to be found.

The stories we tell ourselves attempt to tie these patterns together cohesively, regardless of accuracy or the unrelated nature of our various experiences. These stories or “narratives” are used to help us explain our lives and why things happen to us.

Our brains create stories by piecing together bits of information that we have experienced or heard and combining them into a coherent narrative. We often use our memories, imagination, and emotions to create stories that make sense of the world around us. We also use language to describe and explain our stories, which helps us better understand our experiences.

The psychologist Dan McAdams has studied the stories people tell about the whole arc of their lives, and in his research has found that people who lead meaningful lives tell stories defined by redemption, growth, and love—for example, getting let go from my first job out of college was terrible but it helped me discover that I really wasn’t cut out for a career in business and allowed me to pursue my true calling as a social worker helping others. In contrast, people who believe their lives lack meaning tend to tell what he calls “contamination stories,” where something good happening comes at a great cost, like I made partner, but I lost my family in the process.

Decades of research in cognitive behavioral therapy and narrative psychology has shown that people can indeed change their stories to tell ones that move them forward rather than hold them back—all while trying to respect the facts. If you’re telling a negative story about your life, you can ask yourself what evidence there is for that story and whether there is any evidence that would change the story you’re telling.

We have all probably had the experience of talking with someone who is focusing on a single negative event and catastrophizing about an upcoming test, job interview, or performance review. Yet the day before or even just minutes before, they were telling you about how well they have scored on all the other tests or about some phenomenal praise she received from her boss about a major project she was working on. Somehow, they had forgotten all the positive evidence and were only focusing on the negatives, and this was causing them to tell a more negative (and less reality-based) story. It can be hard but paying more attention to the good things around us can improve the stories we tell ourselves.

If you don’t naturally do this this, you might try telling your story in the third person or imagine that a loved one is telling you this story. We tend to see things more clearly (and more compassionately) when we have some distance.

It is vital that we learn to create a new story about who we are. Instead of shedding a negative light on ourselves, we need to look for a positive spin. Some examples of putting a positive spin on the story could be:

• Instead of “I’m not good enough” say, “I am good enough, I’m just having a difficult time today.”
• Instead of “I will always be a drunk at heart” say, “I’m a survivor of an addiction and I’m feeling overwhelmed at the moment.”
• Instead of “I’m crazy” say, “I may a mental health disorder, but that doesn’t define me.”
• Instead of “I’m a horrible parent” say, “My kids are safe and I’m trying really hard, but I’m overwhelmed at the moment.”
• Instead of “I’m too fat” say, “I need to get back to eating healthy and working out again, because it makes me feel better.”

Our upper and lower stories can also be fear driven if we are not careful.  We need to be mindful of what we revere and worship.  We often reflect what we revere and we often become what we behold.  If we revere and worship the wrong things, the result can be fragile stories that are dominated by fear.    

I will wrap this up with some words from David Foster Wallace, who described a number of fear driven, fragile stories in his commencement speech titles, This is Water:

“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you… Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

As you think about his words and consider these values for yourself, you may think they don’t sound so bad or you may read them and say I would never worship that.

The problem is that these values slowly form without us even realizing it. David Foster Wallace continues:

“The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

That is why the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are so important.  The good news is that your story is not finished.  We can always tell better stories or even fashion new ones if we don’t like the direction or plot of our current story.  Be mindful of what you revere and worship.  Make sure you want to reflect what you revere and want to become what you behold.