Narrative Therapist Michael White tells us that "problems are stories we tell ourselves", implying that if we can tell a different story we can alter our relationship to the perceived problem. This sort of social constructionist approach to life is neither easy nor always pragmatic. We are surrounded by constructs accepted and agreed upon by those around us, even if they've paid very little attention to this acceptance.
Many, in fact maybe most, of those things are positive, evolved sets of social norms that have become everyday due them serving us well and helping us thrive as a community. We generally consider it to not be ok to just kill another person. Most people would agree this is a positive social construct. In general, we don't consider it ok for someone to help themselves to something that belongs to us, yet possession is clearly a social construct, much debated and philosophised about and despite most of us objecting to having our stuff stolen, we still find space for the romantic idea of the gentleman thief, of the grand heist, another Robin Hoodesque social construction.
So what about those social constructs that we accept as part of our everyday that begin to infect and corrode our very psyche? We are fed, more than ever, a diet of endless attainment. Reachable unreachability, lives we can only dream of living and yet we absorb it and judge ourselves by it. How much of us is us? How much of who you are is original thought and how much is a scrap book, a collage, of all the people you have met and all of the movies, ad campaigns, novels and societal tropes that you have been exposed to over the years?
The good news is that neither matters. If you were an entirely original thinker (you're not, none of us are) then you would be able to change your thoughts yourself and therefore be whoever you wanted to be. Conversely and the same, by reflecting upon and understanding more about where your internal sense of you comes from, you can assess, evaluate, retain or discard each piece of it according to how valuable you find it and how reliable and useful the source it came from.
So what makes up your origin story and who gave it you? Often the narratives that shape our lives begin before we are born. Family mottos, expectations and sets of beliefs, entrenched and embodied in our parents and forming the tales of the shape of life and the world as we grow. Then factor in those stories that come with our class, our gender, our race, our religion...the list goes on and on. All adding up to shape our world view before we even consider our personal experiences and evaluations of them.
So how much time should we spend thinking about our stories and where they come from?
My thought is, those that work for us, don't cause harm to others and keep us moving forward, need very little analysis. However, those that create anxiety, hold us back, cloud our world view and corrupt our relationships, should be considered and, ultimately rewritten.
And that's the exciting part.
We really can rework the narratives that exist for ourselves. We can reframe past events using the lens of both the person we are now and the person we wish to be.
A loss becomes a chance to go again, to learn a lesson, to become better.
We are not failures, we are still constructing our success
We are not victims, we are survivors.
We are not losers, we are building towards our biggest win.
With this thinking we can take others with us, we can change the stories for the better of those around us as we move forward with a more positive mindset.
It's not easy, it's a process and takes work, but then so does every best selling story, but it's worth it, especially when it's your own modern classic and you get to be the hero!!
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