WHAT STORY IS ON LOOP IN YOUR HEAD?
I've been saying this a lot lately, to myself as much as anyone else:
The story you tell yourself about what you are experiencing (life, the world, your body, your soul) directly impacts how you go through it. You have your experience, and then you have the story you're telling yourself about the experience, and both of those things together inform your body's perceived reality.
Suppose you grew up in fundamentalist faith (or other) community or environment that prescribed narratives to apply to different experiences. In that case, you might find that you're telling yourself narratives that don't fit what you're going through well, and are communicating to your body a half-truth, a full lie, something that disconnects you from your experience to any extent, in a way that makes you transmute your reaction rather than transcend through to a response.
Everything is story. You are a living story. You are living a story.
When we think of stories, we often think of fiction and fantasy and fairy tales; we think of old tales told over firelight, facts stretched beyond recognition around tables laden with food and drink, dazzling dramatics played out on screen while we crunch popcorn between our teeth. But one thing I've learned about narrative is that truth lives in the greater idea that the story encapsulates. Stories are our most effective way of communicating truth. It's not the static one-off things that happen inside the story but the whole picture that's being painted by it. Words on their own are not enough, but a story?
Patrick Rothfuss wrote:
"It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story."
Narrative therapy focuses on the story you tell yourself about what you're experiencing, the outside influences on that story, and how to re-author your life to get your power back. It aims to provide a separation between who you are and the problem you are experiencing. It's often said: "You are not the problem; the problem is the problem."
But what can happen in our lives, and perhaps we were brought up entrenched in this way of living, is that a problem-saturated story dominates and overpowers all other stories, including ones about possibility and hope. We need help to separate ourselves from these narratives so that we can experience our challenges in a more practical, hopeful, and empowered way.
Growing up Pentecostal here in Australia, there are many stories I have been peeling away from my body, my mind, and my heart, about my body, my mind, my heart, my purpose, the world, my place in it, others, what failure means, what success is, where I'll end up when I die, what that all means, and how it connects me to others. Narrative work, or re-authoring your life, seems huge and heavy and like a lot of work, and collectively, I guess it is. But the beautiful thing about it is that it's so human, so 'in the now,' right here where we are. And we don't need any other expensive tools or books or lists to live within our story in such a way as to write the one we want with the one that we have. It's hopeful, life-generating, possiblity-tingling work.
Story by story, day by day, we live ourselves into new experiences.
This week here in the App, we're going to do some narrative work using the technique of "reframing." We'll take universally experienced negative and destructive self-narratives and reframe them into something more conducive to building the life that we want with the life that we have. One that doesn't ignore, run away from, or aggrandise what we're going through, but empowers us to make good choices, enjoy life, and experience it from underneath the weight of dominant negative narratives.
If everything is story, including the life that you are and the life that you are living, then you, my friend, have the power, the authority, and the capacity to tell a damn good tale. Perhaps all you need to get going is to remember that you are the author, and you don't need to wait to know how to write to start building your story.
REMEMBER: Story by story, day by day, we live ourselves into new experiences; we re-author the way we handle challenges, the way we allow joy, the values we hold dear, and the direction we're heading in.
See you in the App, xo
Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
From this week’s series titled "Re-Framing Automatic Narratives", with a subscription, in the App. Hope to see you there.
