Beliefs, stories and the tales we tell…
When I am working with clients it does not take long for old stories to surface. The kind of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves to justify our experience. They might be labels like “I am lazy”, beliefs like “It is impossible for me to find a loving partner” or much more complex stories about why our life is the way it is.
As these stories pour forth, they often don’t hold up in the face of facts and reason.
I think this can be dangerous.
I think this can be dangerous because I see how easy it can be to dismiss our stories. I hear it in my clients, the way they can get derogatory about themselves and their stories when it becomes unavoidably obvious that they simply cannot be true.
It is easy to make ourselves wrong when we discover that our stories may not be as true as we thought.
When we do this, we miss a very important truth.
While the content of our stories may not be true, the intention of our stories, the reason we tell them is deeply true.
We tell ourselves stories to protect ourselves. We tell ourselves stories to bring sense into a world and a human experience that does not always make sense. We tell ourselves stories to be in congruency with a world full of stories. Stories are an ancient and ingeniously human technology to make sense of our existence. They keep us sane. Our beliefs and stories help us bridge the gap between what we needed and what actually happened to us.
If our circumstances demand it of us, if our stories and beliefs become too heavy to carry we can look at our stories and test them out against fact and reason. Our ability to question our thoughts and beliefs can be a powerful, transformative tool. If we are thinking and behaving in ways that are painful, getting to the root belief driving our experience can be incredibly useful. However, this is delicate terrain and it serves us to be oh so very kind to ourselves and if we can, do it in the presence of others who are also kind to us.
I have seen some very disturbing behavior in groups that only focus on working with and correcting our false cognitions.
Facts and reason are hard and unyielding, and yet we are soft creatures. We have beautiful sensitive psyches. We cannot unpack the truth of our stories without loving, respecting, and honoring their intentions.
Our stories have protected us valiantly, they are always deeply intelligent and full of awesome internal logic . No matter how harsh or unloving they may seem, they all exist for protection, for survival.
They have helped us live and move forward in life, despite sustaining the injury of human hurt we are all destined to experience in this lifetime.
When we only deal with the fact of our stories, we leave the wounded selves they protected undefended.
Changes we are able to make by this purely cognitive route can be significant. We can certainly modify our behavior, for sure. But sustaining these changes requires a huge amount of willpower and mental discipline and at some point, inevitably we will run out of both.
I am not sure we can sustainably “let go” of our stories as an act of will.
I believe when we can bring care, love, and understanding to the reasons we made up the stories in the first place, our misguided thinking tends to melt away all by itself. Our false stories yield and dissolve in truth. We don’t need discipline or willpower to change. Truth itself brings a deep peace and relaxation that dissolves stories we no longer need.
I think we need “bottom-up” processes that support our truth-seeking. We need to feel the safety of our own bodies, of our higher selves, of our own and others' true loving nature.
Our true nature that can love our stories, love what they have done for us and watch them gently dissolve when their life span is over. When we approach this process with love and gentlest, our stories effortlessly let go of us.