What’s the story you’re telling yourself inside your head—the story of your life, and about yourself?
Have you ever noticed that your mind is busy creating a narrative version of your life from the moment you get up in the morning to the moment you go to sleep—creating a thread-line between events, a cause and effect relationship between everything that happens?
Continually connecting the dots, your inner storyteller explains and interprets not only what’s happening, but why it’s happening, what it means, and what it says about you and your future.
This might not be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that you might not recognize your story as a story—and most certainly, not as your personal story, your version of reality based on your individual history, wounds, conditioning and everything else you’ve ever lived.
We think that the movie playing inside our head, the one our inner narrator wrote, produced, directed, and stars in, is the only movie playing in town, and therefore, the movie everyone else is also watching and living in.
We imagine that the story we tell ourselves about who we are is who we are, and the characters we’ve constructed for everyone else in our personal movie is who they are.
Our narrator constructs meanings and intentions for everything in our experience, and yet we believe, respond, and relate to others as if these self-constructed meanings and intentions are objective reality—the one and only Truth.
Simply put, we believe that our narrator’s version of reality is reality, and so does everyone else… They also believe that their version of reality is reality.
This makes for great difficulty in our relationships and everywhere else in our life too.
The problem with our self-stories is that they keep us stuck in repetitive behaviors and beliefs, patterns that generate the same unsatisfying and negative results again and again.
Our narratives write a story about us, and then we set out into the world to find or create evidence for our story and thereby make it true.
The end is that we don’t get what we want. Our self-stories imprison us in a Sisyphusian life, rolling the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back to the bottom, and leave us back where we started.
Notice the story you’re telling yourself inside your head and how you’re creating the link between your experiences — the this happened because of thisthread-line.
Notice where you’re departing from the bare facts, the concrete reality, the it’s raining kind of reality, and where you enter the fictional part of the story, the it’s raining because it’s my day off and of course I’m being punished part of the story.
Notice how you’re deciding what the facts mean and what they say about you and everyone else.
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That is, where your inner narrator begins adding onto the facts and shaping them for its own use—to fit its already written narrative.
Simultaneously, become aware of your assumption that your version of reality is reality, the truth for everyone, and in fact, inarguable.
Take a closer look at the stories you tell yourself… it will change your life.
