What’s your story?
I recently read the remarkable ‘Sorry Isn’t Good Enough,’ by Jane Bailey - a gripping psychological thriller about a nine-year-old girl who befriends a lonely old man with tragic consequences. What made it remarkable was the way the author skillfully takes us into the mind of a nine-year-old girl who believes that she’s unlovable. Her mother doesn’t call her poppet or touch her hair tenderly or hug her like her friend’s mother does. She longs for these symbols of affection and tries desperately to win her mother’s love. Her attempts are painfully misguided and she ends up causing her mother extra work and frustration. Her mother’s irritated response miserably reinforces this little girl’s conclusion that she must be unlovable.
The book works so well because the reader can simultaneously walk in the child’s shoes - and acutely appreciate her anguish and pain - whilst simultaneously holding onto our adult view point. Through adult eyes it’s clear that the mother has her own issues that make her emotionally unavailable (as the protagonist also comes to understand once she grows up). Through adult eyes we can see the pinpricks of evidence that she does love her daughter but struggles to show it. Through adult eyes we can see that the mother is probably depressed and definitely trapped by the confines of the expectations of women at the time. We can see she is struggling with her own stuff whilst simultaneously actually trying to be a good mother.
I loved this book. It made me want to weep for the little girl whilst recognising the universality of her experience. We all have stories about who we are that are forged from an immature interpretation of our childhood experiences. Therapy often involves helping people to re-write these stories, to think differently about how they came to be who they think they are. You could argue that the past has already happened and we should really just focus on the present and future, but we also know that the narratives we have about the past can all too often become self-fulfilling, that they’re not actually just stories about the past, they shape our future too. When we develop a different narrative about the past, it can change how we see ourselves in the present. And that different self-image changes how we behave which, of course, inevitably leads to a different future.
Therapists therefore try to loosen the ties to any unhelpful narratives which were forged in childhood, long before our brains were even fully formed and crucially whilst we were still ego-centric. Beliefs that we are bad, unworthy, stupid, clumsy, selfish or unlovable, sometimes come directly from the words of caregivers. We are often told who we are by those on whom we rely for survival. It’s terrifying to contemplate that these people, who we need so much, may actually be flawed or wrong in any way. So we assume they are right, and swallow their opinions whole. But their opinions are just their own stories. They are not ‘the truth.’
Other self-beliefs, or ‘stories’ about who we are, evolve through our interpretation of events just like the nine-year-old in Jane Bailey’s excellent novel who - with her partially formed brain remember - concludes unequivocally that she’s unlovable. That then becomes a filter for the rest of her life. Even once she understands what the reader can see all along, that her mother had her own issues that made her emotionally unavailable, the damage isn’t miraculously undone.
We can’t hold two opposing beliefs at the same time, it’s called cognitive dissonance and it really messes with your head! This means from then on, although we don’t get much detail of this in the book, the little girl will experience everything through the belief that she’s unlovable, filtering out any evidence that contradicts that belief and noticing every tiny sign that seems to confirm it. And so she’ll collect many more stories that ‘prove’ that she’s unlovable, even though it was NEVER quite true!
My first novel, The Wrong Story, is out in May and explores this theme of the stories we tell ourselves. I wanted to invite readers to consider the stories they have about their own past and to think about where those stories came from and whether they are true. Often we don’t stop to consider that question, our stories are so familiar, but without this reflection, these stories can - and do - hold us back.
So how do you re-write your own story? The first step is to notice that it is a story and that a story is not the same as ‘the truth.’ Then start by just holding the story a little less tightly. Stay curious and open to another version of events. And then get curious about what difference it would make to your life if your current version of the story wasn’t actually true or even just wasn’t the whole truth.
Author and teacher Byron Katie, asked in the title of her 2008 book, Who would you be without your story? It’s a great question, so I’ll ask it too…
What’s your story and who would you be without it?
To learn more about this, see also the TED talk by Lori Gottlieb on ‘Change your story, change your life’ https://www.ted.com/talks/lori_gottlieb_how_changing_your_story_can_change_your_life?language=en