The Stories We Tell Ourselves Are Key To Liberation

Our minds get stuck in a feedback loop. When things go wrong, they often go really wrong, and our brains can grab onto that and really send us into a spiral with our self-talk. It’s important to recognize this, to understand that when we start to catastrophize it’s because of the way our brains work, something that happened in our pasts, and most likely not the actual situation. Changing to positive self-talk can be one way to counteract this, but understanding our stories is so much more powerful and creates lasting change.

Sure, things can go sideways. Really wrong. To shit. Whatever words you use, the truth is it can happen. And it can be difficult to remember that no two moments are the same. That what is happening now is not exactly like what happened in the past, and because of that, it may not have the same outcome.

The most important way to work ourselves back from burnout, or a dark night of the soul, or even just a no-good-horrible-crappy day is to understand the stories we tell ourselves as a way of framing positive self-talk. The truth is most of the stories we tell ourselves aren’t even ours. They’re what we learned from well-meaning relatives, from family members who have our “best interests” at heart. They’re what we picked up at school or from coworkers. They’re things that we learned about ourselves, not the truths about who we are.

A large part of positive self-talk is understanding who you are and moving toward that goal. My mother taught me that “we’re not the kind of people who” and then fill in any good thing from winning a raffle to get high paying jobs. That’s just not who we are, she’d say. We’re not the kind of people who have nice things happen to them.

I internalized that. I learned that lesson very well, applying myself to it the way I applied myself to my school work. And then I asked one important question: who says?

Who made up this arbitrary rule? Was it the universe? God? If all good things come from God, then why don’t good things happen to us? Doesn’t God love us too? And I think those questions, even though I didn’t voice them to anyone at the time, were the start of my spiritual searching for truth. Because a God who asked us to love our neighbor, but who didn’t love us enough to give us good things, well that didn’t sound right to childhood me, and it still doesn’t.

Questions allow us to think about the stories we learned and how they contribute to our positive self-talk (or our negative self-talk). Questioning those stories can lead to epiphanies that can literally change our lives. One of the best things I’ve found to help me with that is to have people in my life who are willing to hold space and allow me to make those connections on my own. A good mentor doesn’t give you the answers; a good mentor gives you the space to figure them out on your own with just some gentle encouragement and direction.

Understanding your stories can lead to liberation from those which no longer serve us at a personal level, a cultural level, a societal level, and even, yes, on a global level. All change begins with a single story.