Narrative, Part 1 - The Story of You
Narrative is at the heart of how we, as humans, make sense of the world (and even how we construct our own sense of self!). Sometimes this idea seems strange to people - it’s not immediately obvious how stories are related to understanding the world, or to how we think and feel about ourselves. But the phenomenon of myth - sets of stories about the personified forces that make the world go round - has been a common feature of all societies throughout time, ours included. People have always received models of the world in this form, and then turned around and used the figures from those stories to make sense of the things happening around them.
Likewise, all of us have stories about our lives that describe the important forces that shaped us, and that we then use to make sense of both the things that happen to us and the things we do in response. These stories may feature our parents, traumas, alcoholism, or hard work, but whoever the players are, the purpose they serve is to help us hold onto a consistent picture of ourselves. The one common player in all of these stories is you, and it is through this historical narrative that all the different experiences you have had in your life get woven into a felt sense of yourself.
One of the most powerful moves in therapy is to identify, in an honest and non-judgemental way, the narratives that are shaping your life. Once you’ve done this you can start to see the places where you’re unconsciously conforming to these storylines, even when there might be opportunities to do things differently.
By their very nature, stories have a beginning, middle, and end - there is an arc to them that points in a particular direction. The stories you use to make sense of the world work the same way - they contain an arc which tends to define the direction of the events of your life. Certainly the world can still throw unexpected things at you, but we’re talking about a general tendency here.
If the arc of your stories is one of beautiful successes - you see opportunities, grab them, make great use of them, and then profit from the results - then you tend to see the world in terms of opportunity and profitable work. And much of the time the world will conform to that. Not that bad things can’t or won’t happen, not that it always works out that way, but in spite of the setbacks you are primed to see opportunity and the potential for profit. And having eyes for those things gives you more chances to recognize them in the world.
On the other hand, if the arc of your stories follows the screw-up genre - you’re handed opportunity but always botch it up and then live in regret for the rest of your life - then that narrative tends to shape how you perceive the world. And rather than seeing opportunity as the first ingredient of success, it instead becomes the precursor to failure and regret. Rather than opening the door to prosperity, opportunity becomes the hook upon which all manner of failures can be hung. And with the emphasis more on the potential for failure than on the potential for success, that’s where your experience tends to go, in the same way that a bicycle will tend to follow where you are looking.
The good news here is that when you become aware of this storyline you get the opportunity to shift it and open up new possibilities. A personal example - there was a period in my life where I was working a software job that happened to have a lot of idle time, and a ping pong table in the office. I would play with my co-workers, and actually got pretty good. But no matter how well I found myself playing most of the time, I still seemed to choke at the end of most games, blowing often sizable leads. As I reflected on that (or agonized over it!) I started to notice that in the final points of these games I started to have a mental conversation that went something like “I wonder how I’m going to screw it up this time?” That talk was the expression of an underlying storyline, or deep belief, I had about myself that I was always going to lose. When I became aware of that talk I was able to shift it - when I noticed it happening I would just start to tell myself, “You’ve got this.” And it worked - I stopped choking, and started winning those matches.
In the next posts in this series I’ll talk more about working with these narratives in therapy, and then about the cultural context of them. And if you’d like help working with this material then please reach out!