The Stories We Tell

Our inherent compulsion to create and share stories is what sets us apart from all other species. While our animal counterparts are locked into instinctive patterns of behaviour, humans possess the cognitive ability to add meaning to and record narratives of past events. Cows chew grass, birds fly high, and fish swim in the seas without ever translating their experiences into meaning. Not so humans; in fact, the entire human experience is a grand collection of tales reflecting an approximation of our history. In the entire universe, as far as we know, we alone are the storytellers.

Indigenous cultures, such as the Aboriginal culture of Australia, without having ever invented a written language, pass on their creation stories through spoken word and the phenomenon of song lines. Stories are a technology created by humans to preserve and perpetuate the wisdom gained through collective experience, and to enhance our chances of surviving and thriving. Stories have a much greater impact on us than the data or facts surrounding the events in our lives. Indeed, it is man's search for meaning that shapes his perceptual models of the world and his relationship to them.

Stories, like other forms of narrative, may be factual and contain relative truths, or fictional and contain relative falsehoods. Fact-checking your own archive of personal stories about yourself and the world is, in my opinion, an essential task for error correction and the expansion of your self-awareness.

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
—Mark Twain

Your personal stories about yourself, others, and the world will often contain misguided beliefs and perspectives that you rely on to navigate your way through life. A thorough audit and re-writing of your outdated (and almost always false) stories is required to ensure you are properly oriented on your life path. Yet, where are we educated about this? And from whom will we find direction on how to proceed with this critical endeavour? In my own personal experience with therapy, I believed that psychologists were equipped with this skillset. As a young man in his twenties feeling lost and confused, I assumed that they could redirect and reorientate me. I was mistaken.

The unfortunate outcome of my experience with two years of psychotherapy was leaving with a collection of professionally reinforced stories that were just not so. I walked away from therapy, with professional validation that my mother doesn't love me, my father doesn't love me, I’m a victim of abuse, and I am damaged goods. It wasn't until my mid-forties that I challenged the validity of these stories and found them to be false and misleading.

My personal breakthrough came through being educated by a coach. His approach was to shift the focus away from what happened to me, and towards what I made it mean about me. In the words of Dr. Gabor Mate, your trauma is not what happened to you, but what is happening inside of you because of what happened to you. That is, the suffering and upset we experience in life are not attached to the historical events, but to the sad stories we perpetuate about those past events. By letting go of the self-authored and inaccurate stories, I was able to also let go of the suffering I was perpetually creating by being attached to them. When we change our stories, we change our lives.

Self-authored stories when told repeatedly, become beliefs. I had developed a victim identity supported by my therapists, and I repeated my victim stories frequently to basically anyone who would listen. This only reinforced my stories and consolidated them into beliefs. Beliefs are powerful motivators of your decisions and actions, often more so than reality itself. This can be demonstrated by the following example.

Imagine you are walking in the woods at dusk, and in the dim light you see a snake on the ground. Immediately you recoil and jump back to a safe distance to avoid harm. You look again, and you notice that it is not a snake after all, but rather a piece of rope which you mistook for a snake. Now ask yourself, was it reality that caused your action? Or was it your belief that caused you to act? In reality, there would be no need to avoid a piece of rope. So your belief that the rope was a snake caused your action.

When we change our stories, we change our lives.

When we continue to repeat inaccurate stories about ourselves, others, and the world, these stories solidify into beliefs that shape our choices and actions in ways that can be detrimental to us. As a trauma therapist and shadow integration coach, I encourage my clients to uncover their often hidden and unconscious stories and beliefs, and challenge them.

You will continue to create stories as you make meaning of the events in your life, because it is human to do so. But stories that solidify into self-limiting beliefs have the potential to shape your actions in a way that produces unwanted results. Shadow work is a powerful tool that focuses your awareness on these hidden and unconscious stories and beliefs, bringing them to light. We all love a good story, so when making up stories in the future, be sure to do so consciously and with precise awareness.

If you are looking to rewrite your life story, shadow work may be for you.