You Are the Stories You Tell About Yourself
Narrative Identity and what you say to yourself in the mirror are feedback loops that play a big role in creating who you are
You are the stories you tell about yourself. This is a question of how you define the kind of person you are, what your strengths and weaknesses are, whether you are someone who has things happen to them, or whether you make things happen. I’ve written before about how stories are the communication of ethics–ways of living–and the stories you tell about yourself are how you communicate a definition of yourself to your own psyche.
When I use the word “story” here I mean it as part of the “self-narrative” or “narrative identity” we all have: the internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to make sense and meaning out of his or her life.
Narrative identity is complex and leads to the development of things you say to yourself like “I am a talkative person,” or “I am bad at math.” It’s actually larger than this and encompasses more complete life stories like how you overcame a bad breakup, but for this post we’ll keep the focus narrowed to what your narratives tell you about the kind of person you are.
You develop these stories of yourself based on previous experiences, and you adjust your behavior and life decisions using those stories. If you tell yourself you are bad at math you might avoid learning how to code for example. Or if you had a good basketball game one time early in life you may have started telling yourself you are good at basketball and decided to keep playing and practicing.
These stories end up becoming self-fulfilling truths about yourself. One good experience playing basketball could have led you on a path to practice and become better. One bad experience trying math could have led you to avoid math and forever remain bad at it. Even the way you present yourself from the clothes you wear to the way you carry yourself is determined in large part by your own stories about yourself.
But there is something to consider: stories of yourself could be wrong. You might actually be better (or worse) at something than you believe, and the story you tell could be making you better or worse than you would otherwise be if you were telling yourself a different story.
Remember that you have a choice of what story to tell yourself. You can freely choose to tell a different story about yourself than you normally have been. No one is stopping you.
This might sound pseudosciencey so far, but psychologists are researching these kinds of self narratives and finding interesting results. For example, repeating positive affirmations to yourself do seem to work:
Timely affirmations have been shown to improve education, health, and relationship outcomes, with benefits that sometimes persist for months and years. Like other interventions and experiences, self-affirmations can have lasting benefits when they touch off a cycle of adaptive potential, a positive feedback loop between the self-system and the social system that propagates adaptive outcomes over time.
What’s going on inside the mind to make them work? Allyson Chiu of the Washington Post reviewed some of the literature and asked clinical psychologists here.
Affirmations seem to engage regions of the brain associated with positive valuation and self-processing, said Cascio, citing his research findings. He added that his work found that affirmations related to “future-oriented values” — for example, if family is a core value, you could think about time you’re planning to spend with them — were “much more beneficial in terms of the affirmation’s success compared to thinking about the past,” because doing so engaged the value and self-processing regions of the brain to a greater degree.
Other studies show that affirmation activities can activate the brain’s reward system — the same system that responds to sex or drugs, Creswell said.
“There’s a really cool brain basis for these self-affirmation effects,” he said. “They’re really turning on the brain’s reward system, and that reward system is sort of then muffling your stress alarm system in ways that can be helpful.”
Although yes psychologists point out they can work, they also have limitations. Using overly generic affirmations probably don’t work, and you have to find what you’re telling yourself at least somewhat believable. You can’t fully lie to yourself and expect to feel anything. Having said that, you can change and improve and what may be a lie today might not be a lie tomorrow. You can’t lie and say to yourself you are an excellent singer today, but you could affirm you have the potential to be an excellent singer, and then, with practice, find you are able to call yourself an excellent singer in the future.
Connected with that kind of positive affirmation is affirming aspects of yourself that create a coherent story of who you are. Affirm what you love. Reminding yourself what you love (being a parent, painting, volunteering, etc) reminds you of what you value, provides a sense of purpose, and helps create a coherent story for yourself.
Your story is more than just your words to yourself. Even the clothes you wear help create the story you have of yourself. Different clothes you associate with different qualities will bring out those qualities in yourself. I wrote about it here, but to give one example, subjects in a study who wore a white coat, described as a doctor’s lab coat, performed better on cognitive tests, than subjects given the same coat, but had it described to them as a painter’s frock.
Damaging stories
A while ago
of Noahpinion wrote about his conception of depression. It’s a powerful post about what he experienced going through depression following the death of his mother, and how he came to conceptualize it.He uses a story driven model and describes depression as coming from a negative self narrative.
Depressed people may need a new "narrative". I've also called this a "new perspective", but I think the word "narrative" fits better. I've discussed my "narrative theory of depression" at length with psychotherapists. Keep in mind that this theory of mine might be wrong, and even if it's right, it might only be right for a subset of depressed people!
Basically, I think that the most important repetitive negative thought that afflicts depressed people is negative self-evaluation. You think, in a very detached, dissociated way, "The person who I call 'me' is a worthless person." And I think that the main criterion that we use to evaluate people is the narrative; a story that seems to unify and make sense of a person's life. Obviously, this is not a realistic or accurate method; human beings are not consistent, we are not simple, and we don't make sense. The narratives that we construct for ourselves are mostly bullshit. We construct them out of a need to make sense of the world, not as rational scientific theories that best fit the available data.
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I believe that many depressed people are constantly afflicted by the crushing negative feedback of a negative personal narrative. And I've found that the biggest single thing that helps people out of depression is the scrapping of the negative narrative and its replacement with a positive alternative narrative. This is usually possible, because narratives are mostly constructed out of bullshit - replace the bad bullshit with good bullshit, and you win. But that is much easier said than done.
Noah Smith
Narratives, the stories we tell ourselves and live our lives with, are feedback loops. If you constantly tell yourself that you are doomed to failure then you are far more likely to take actions (or no action) that will lead to failure. The flipside is that if you constantly tell yourself you can succeed and you are good enough then you will be far more likely to succeed. Your stories become your reality.
Your Stories Aren’t As Fixed As You Think
Much of growing up means learning about yourself. It means getting life experiences, and learning (or maybe better to say, writing) stories about yourself. Growing up means developing more and more stories. I think this is a large reason why children can bounce back from failures so quickly and keep trying new things. Kids haven’t developed stories yet so their mental image of themselves is a clean slate. Adults on the other hand are burdened (or empowered) by the stories they’ve developed over their lives.
But those aspects of your identity that are determined by your stories aren’t fixed. If you change your stories then that part of your identity will change with it. I don’t mean that every part of your identity is determined by your stories, but much of it will be.
That’s the weird thing about your stories: you can change yourself by choosing to tell different stories about yourself. They don’t even necessarily need to be true stories–yet. They just need to be stories that you can believe are possible. Repeat them often enough so that you’ll subconsciously start to integrate them into your sense of self and begin behaving as if they are true.
This is not some kind of fix-all-your-problems-with-this-one-weird-trick thing though. Psychologists describe narrative identity as a separate, but related layer of your identity to The Big Five personality traits. Regardless of what stories you tell about yourself there is still an objective reality that will enforce limits. I’m not going to become the next Einstein just because I start telling myself I’m as smart as Einstein. Some aspects of yourself are relatively fixed, but that doesn’t mean you are stuck either
These stories can push you to grow into a better version of yourself, or unlock aspects of yourself you always had, but hid beneath incorrect stories you told about yourself. Maybe you aren’t actually as shy and socially awkward as you think and you are capable of developing good social skills and no longer being afraid of meeting new people.
How To Change Your Stories
So what do you do with all this? Fundamentally it’s about deciding who you want to be and not be, observing and acknowledging the stories you currently tell about yourself, then stop telling the ones leading you to be a person you don’t want to be and start telling stories about yourself that lead you to someone you do want to be.
A simple method to start with is to observe and write down the stories you already tell about yourself. List all your that-happens-to-me’s, I-am-this-type-of-person’s, and I-am-no-good-at-this’s. These could be good or bad. Once you’ve done this you can think of the kind of person you want to be–what kind of I-am-this-kind-of-person’s does the idealized version of you get to tell about themself.
Now, concentrate on refusing to tell the negative stories, and tell yourself the positive ones. Yes you can even lie (by omission) to yourself–as hard as that actually might be. When you catch yourself telling the negative stories about yourself–even if they are objectively true at this moment in your life–you stop.
Prove Your Story Wrong
Something you might have to get over is a feeling we all get: we don’t like being wrong. It’s comforting to feel right about something, but this is precisely the feeling you have to throw away if you want to change yourself. You have to prove yourself wrong. You might have seen it in yourself or in others when words of encouragement are given and defensive feelings come up. You know yourself better than this other person so who are they to tell you that you are actually capable of doing this?
It’s hard to say you were wrong, and especially hard to say you were wrong about yourself, but this is what you are trying to do when you’re changing your story. You can help yourself start realizing you are wrong by doing small things that go against your damaging story. I say small things because they are easier to start and do in quantity than one big thing.
For example, if you tell yourself you are a shy person then do small things that a shy person would not do. Would a shy person ask the cashier how their day is going in that awkward moment when they’re ringing through your order? Of course not. You don’t have to go as far as striking up a conversation. Just that simple interaction of asking how someone’s day is going is more than a shy person would do.
Really this is just another way of saying you should practice, but the goal isn’t just to practice to get better at something, but to practice to prove to yourself you were wrong about the kind of person you are. You are erasing the story you wrote about yourself and making room to write a new one.
Consciously Tell Yourself A New One Until You Believe It
Treat yourself at least as well as you would treat a friend. You can’t exactly lie to yourself, but you can remind yourself of your good qualities and potential. You aren’t a loser, you just haven’t unlocked the winner inside you yet. Sounds cringe and like something from a children’s story, but those stories resonate because they contain certain universal truths of the human condition.
Keep repeating the story you want to embody and slowly you’ll begin to think and behave as if it is true. But just repeating something will only get you so far. The longer you repeat it without taking actions to make it a true story, the harder it will be for you to keep repeating it. You’ll go much further by taking actions that prove those new stories true to yourself.