What Story Are You Telling Yourself?

"The story you tell yourself is the most important story. You learn that story from a thousand sources-your caregivers, your authority figures, your family, friends, peers, teachers, and your experiences. What story do you tell yourself? I buried myself in books as a child to escape a ferocious family. While they were busy taking no prisoners, I read fairy tales, King Arthur, Greek and Roman myths, adventure stories, biographies, the Arabian Nights, Narnia and Middle Earth-everything I could get my pudgy little fingers on."

"Is your world basically good, or basically evil? Fair or unfair, benign or fraught with danger at every turn? Predictable or chance-filled? The story you tell yourself governs your attitude toward life, and ultimately what you set out to achieve-and therefore what you can achieve. The most important parts of your story are the ones that you are least aware of: the nature of the world you find yourself in, the assumptions about how other people will behave,"

"When I'm sitting in a darkened auditorium and listening to an introduction about someone, getting ready to hear a speech, and that person is set before me as "the first one in her family to achieve X," I pay special attention. I'm prepared to learn something fundamentally important from the speaker because of the special difficulty involved in breaking the mold that family stories place on their children."

Personal narratives form from caregivers, authority figures, family, friends, peers, teachers and lived experiences and become the primary map for interpreting life. Early influences and chosen stories determine whether the world is seen as good or dangerous, fair or arbitrary, predictable or chance-driven. Those narratives set implicit rules about acceptable ambition, expected behavior from others, and personal standards for success or failure. Imagined roles and inherited family stories can limit or propel choices. Writing a consistent, complete account of one’s inherited and adopted narrative exposes hidden assumptions and clarifies which parts of identity are chosen.

Read at Psychology Today