The stories we tell ourselves

I got barely three hours’ sleep last night (stress-induced insomnia is never fun, is it?), but I am like a dog going after a bone with this commitment. I do not want to break the chain.

Today my amazing friend Hannah and another wonderful colleague Michaela and I drove to the New Forest to facilitate a day of workshops on resilience, self-care and well-being for a charity that works with young people. It was an ace day. A nice bit of synchronicity showed up at lunchtime when Facebook reminded me that it was this day a year ago that Michaela and I facilitated a session for 170 people at the Teenage Cancer Trust. A year to the day later and there we were again, working with around 100 people.

One of the themes we explored throughout the day was the stories we tell ourselves. We humans are meaning making factories. We’re constantly interpreting evidence and assigning meaning to things – meaning that things don’t necessarily have. Those interpretations then make us feel a certain way: anywhere on the spectrum of emotion from expansive, loved and joyful to stressed out, jealous, angry, depressed and panicked, with a myriad options in between… the possibilities are endless.

The problem is, as Lori Gottlieb teaches, we are extremely unreliable narrators of our own lives.

We’re constantly misinterpreting, mistakenly assuming and failing to see the whole picture. Our inner critics filter everything through self-criticism and catastophising; our egos through defence, cynicism and self-importance; our superegos through the internal architecture of ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ we internalised during our upbringings. Our default stories, I generally find, are small and limiting, not expansive and empowering. They cause us pain, feel heavy and sticky, and lead us away from what it is we really want to feel.

I’m good at teaching this stuff but I still struggle in certain areas to shift the stories I am telling myself. I know I cause myself and my loved ones a lot more difficulty than if I were to simply let go and trust. I do my best. I am not a master of this. Sometimes I end up anxious, unable to sleep, catastrophising and re-experiencing old traumatic bodily sensations. At the moment this is happening in one part of my life in particular and last night, it meant I simply could not sleep.

I want to flex the muscle of shifting the stories that cause me pain. I want to find more trusting interpretations and to find a way to house those new stories in my body until they feel true. I know that there are deeply profound things to say about this work, but right now I cannot find the words. I can, however, repeat the title of this post: the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves.

Doing this reminds me of a line from a Stereophonics song: half the lies you tell ain’t true.

Practising changing the story takes work, commitment and a genuine willingness to see things differently. I am not yet there in the outcome but the willingness, I have. i hope that if you have read this far, you will accept the invitation to pay attention to the stories you tell yourself that cause you pain, and explore whether you want to tell a different one, instead. With a bit of willingness and a lot of work, maybe I’ll see you in the land of the stories that feel real and true and generous and kind.

(Photo by Reuben Juarez on Unsplash. Thank you, Reuben.)