The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Creating Lives for Better or Worse

Consider this:

You are the Author of your personal stories; you are not just the hapless main character to whom life happens.

Every one of us has stories about our lives; a personal narrative with sub-plots, and twists and turns that relate our experiences and that we retell to both ourselves and to others.

Our stories create the thread of our identity and the thread thickens each time we retell them.

Particular narratives can have an adverse impact on our well-being, our relationships, and how we see ourselves in the world, but we may never have considered that there is always more than one way to construct a story.

This does not mean that our story ignores the truth. Rather, our story is placed carefully in a larger context, in a way that makes sense of it, and that we remain aware that perhaps the whole story has not yet finished. Where we choose to end a story can make all the difference between whether it becomes an uplifting story, or an unsettling and unresolved story.

This is particularly important if your personal story is one that appears to have had a downward trajectory during your life. Some examples are:

·        A lost career opportunity

·        The end of a relationship

·        An unexpected health dilemma

·        Loss of autonomy

·        Family breakdown

·        The death of someone significant to you

·        The apparent ending of something in your life that you valued.

·        A change in circumstances that leaves you feeling stuck

Our personal narratives are often unconsciously constructed as a result. We may believe that they merely describe the historical facts of our lives but in fact, they are our own version of events elaborated with our personal interpretations, biases, associations, additions, and redactions.

Certainly, we have little control over some things that may happen to us, but we can have more say over how we make sense of it. And our understanding of life events can change over time which can mean that the story changes too.

In fact, we may eventually reconcile our experiences, becoming aware of some positives that have emerged out of what initially looked like a bad story. We can come to a deeper understanding of the bigger narrative context that helps us develop a meaningful version of the story.

To get to this point, we need to decide where the story starts and where the story finishes; the latter being the most critical aspect of whether we create a story that is Redemptive or Contaminated.

A Contaminated story sequence is one that appears to start well but ends badly.

A Redemptive story is one that starts badly but takes an upward trajectory and ends better.

Research has indicated that people with more Redemptive stories in their personal narrative, tend to experience more positive well-being, have higher self-esteem, experience more life satisfaction, and lower levels of depression than those whose stories are Contaminated. *(McAdams, D.P., Logan, R.L & Reischer, H.N. Journal of Personality, Vol. 100, Oct. 2022)

However, rather than focusing on happy and unhappy stories, the single most important factor in the stories you hold about your life is to create a Meaningful story.

In order to create a meaningful story, we need to make sense of our experiences. We need to be able to take some learnings from our experiences that will serve us positively in the future. This will help us to integrate our life experiences, good or bad, into our narrative. Learnings may take time to be realised as it may be necessary to allow ourselves to experience emotions like sadness, grief, loss, anger, and fear before we are ready to consider the bigger picture.

Our personal stories will clearly indicate whether we are in the Driver’s seat or the Passenger’s seat in our lives. Being in the Driver’s seat requires us to make sense of what’s happening in order to learn, make decisions, have balanced judgement, and take responsibility for our direction. Those in the Passenger’s seat more often have stories that infer life just happens to them and that they must now sit with negative outcomes. The tone of your stories will tell you where you are presently sitting.

Having personal agency gives us hope, optimism, and a feeling of self-efficacy; that is we can also choose to author our stories so that they inform our lives for the better.

Ultimately, the way we tell our life stories, really matters.

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*https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009265662200099X#:~:text=Prior%20research%20has%20shown%20that,generativity%20and%20psychological%20well%2Dbeing

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