WRITE NOW THERAPY!

What’s your story and how would you tell it? No one can tell your story like you. Certainly, the people around you could tell a story about you but it wouldn’t be truly accurate. Our parents would likely get it wrong in some regards. Our significant other wouldn’t get it right either.

We are the only person capable of narrating the story of our life. There is no greater an expert than us. How we feel about ourselves, our lives, our worth, would dictate the type of story we would tell. Would it be a tragedy or comedy? A hero’s journey? A martyr’s burden? Hopefully, something we could fill with laughs and emotion that would tell the true story of us.

HOW WOULD YOU TELL YOUR STORY?

Let’s imagine you are going to tell the story of you. How would you begin? What would be the high and low points in the story and how would it end? Think about it for a minute or two.

We recall our life story like we are reading a story. There are characters and events we string together in sequence that show where we came from to demonstrate who we are now. The linked together sequence of events become the plot in our story. The events we highlight in our autobiography are the ones we select and assign meaning to. We select the events in our life that we believe tell the most accurate version of how we see ourselves.

Our goal in figuring out our life story, even in a casual way, is to solve the puzzle of who we are for ourselves. We want to make sense out of who we are and we use our “history” of “herstory” to piece together the plot of our life.

OUR STORY SAYS HOW WE SEE OURSELVES

The way we see ourselves now is shaped by the story we tell ourselves about our past. There really is no right way to do this. However, the story we end up telling about ourselves will actually say a lot about how we see ourselves. We select the memories and events that lead to the drawn conclusions we have and make the most sense to the overall story we are tell about ourselves. In doing so,  we also omit the events that tell a different story. We give priority to the events that fit the overall narrative story we have created. We need our narrative story to make sense to us so we can understand who we are and accept who we are because of it.

ARE YOU A HERO OR VICTIM?

Our narrative can tell us we are heroes, good guys or girls, even all-star celebrities. It can also tell us we are victims, losers, unaccepted, and rejected. All depending on the narrative story we have pieced together to make up our own history.

Obviously, interpreting our own story carries with it much weight. What story are you telling and what have you selected as defining moments in your life? And how do those events then define you?

More importantly, what events have you cut from the plot of your story? What is it you’re choosing to omit and why? Depending on how you feel about yourself will determine how the story unfolds.

Here is the most interesting thing about this: there is more than one way to tell our story. In fact, if your story feels tragic or paints you in a sad or depressed or angry light, you can re-write it.

IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE STORY, YOU CAN RE-WRITE IT!

In fact, there is a therapeutic process in which rewriting your narrative story is used to improve understanding, self-esteem, and help in overcoming pain from the past. You aren’t fictionalizing the story or making it up to change it. Remember, I said we have selected events in our life and linked them together to tell the story that makes sense to who we are.

The same thing can be done to change the story. Instead of focusing on the events in your life that you have linked together to tell a negative story about yourself, you are going to select events in your life that tells a different, more positive story.

CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

For example, instead of focusing on a story or event that highlights your parent’s alcoholism, Look for real events about your parent that goes beyond the addiction. What things happened in your relationship with your parent that was positive or good? Was there a Christmas that had a happy memory? Was there a time, your parent did something small that told you they loved you? Maybe it was asking for forgiveness or reading to you as a child or offering you a small gift out of the blue. What good was there in that relationship.

Don’t do it. Don’t say there was no good in anything. It simply isn’t true. Even the worst of us have happy memories though they may be few and far between. It may not be directly our parents, our positive events could have come from a grandparent, a teacher, a foster parent, friend or coach.

In re-authoring our story to tell a different side to our life, we need to work to find those events that tell that different story. We need to select more of these stories and link them together so the new story has as much more vivid richness then the original story we told. The more we can add, the richer and fuller the story becomes so it becomes the dominant story in our life.

NEED HELP? PHONE A FRIEND

If you’re struggling to recall positive events in you life, luckily for you, we are not born or live in total isolation. It is perfectly acceptable to ask friends and family to recall positive events in your life. Ask about what they saw in a relationship with someone else you may be avoiding. Ask them to tell you about a time when something great happened in your life. A time when you were happy. A time when someeone showed you love.

Depending how married to your original dominate story you are, some of what you hear from people in your life may even shock or surprise you. They may remember something you long buried or have forgotten. Remember, we focus our attention on events in our life that reinforce the plot we are telling about ourselves. Events in our past that don’t support our narrative can easily be pushed to the back of our memory as insignificant.

Your defining dominate story has lasting effects. Your future life will be subject to the story you are already clinging to. This is why it is best to redefine that story if it is one that isn’t doing you any good. Bad things happen to all of us, what value we give them determines how affected by them we are.

YOU HAVE CHOICES! MAKE THEM WISELY!

You may feel like you don’t really have a choice in how events shape your life but you do. In fact, how you let what happens to you in life affect you is the most important factor in your life. Determining what will be the dominant story in your life versus the alternative story and what each of those stories tell you about you is important.

Who we are to ourselves, to our family, and the community around us helps shape our vision of ourselves and the world around us. The influences from outside of us factor greatly in our views. However, as strong as those views from outside are, we have the choice to determine our own vision and outcome. We are not merely a victim of our circumsances and surroundings. We get to choose what we take and make it our own story.

This is why it is possible to see people rise above great obstacles in their life. Victims of tragic events of any proporation have been known to rise above them and set a new course for their life. It is why we see people living in extreme poverty or victims of extreme tragic events turn their lives around. They refuse to let the dominate story in their life be that of a victim.

The way you tell your own story both directly and indirectly shapes who you are and your future. If your dominate story is one that you wish to change you can. What is the story of your life? How is it written and what needs to change? Is your life story that of a victim or hero?

Here is how you can change your narrative story:

• Look for alternative events in your life and link them together to tell the story differently
• Ask friends and family for specific events that tell a happy story. Ask them to tell you when something good happened to you. A time you were happy. Something that demonstrated you were loved.
• If abuse or a traumatic event happened in your life, think of a time where you rose above it. Where that event didn’t seem to matter.

If thinking about your narrative story of your life brings you tremendoes anxiety or feels very owerwhelming you are not alone. There are resources available to you included specific guided journals, therapists and mental health coaches that can help you overcome your dominate story. In particular, there are professional therapists who specialize in Narrative Therapy that have been trained to guide you through this very process.

The story of your life doesn’t have to be a tradey or a comedy. You can rewrite history. Afterall, every country on the planet does it and then teaches their “version” of what happened in the past to children in the educational system. Why wouldn’t you do the same thing for yourself.