Telling Ourselves Better Stories

"Remember, we are not what happened to us. We are what we wish to become and what wishes to enter life through us." — James Hollis

I’m hosting an AMA on Zoom for paid Substack subscribers this Saturday, November 22nd at 10amPT—we’re going to focus on Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, so bring some of the stories that you want to work on (or questions in general). This isn’t a formal workshop, more of a group hang. The link to register is at the bottom of this email, behind the paywall.

SAN FRANCISCO AREA FRIENDS: I’ll be doing an evening at Book Society in Berkeley on January 22nd (Thursday) and an evening with Happy Women Dinners in Napa Valley at Frog’s Leap Winery on January 23rd (Friday). Tickets for both events can be found here!

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I’m at the very end of an event series for Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness and spent time this weekend with a group of wonderful women in Orange County. The subject, as always, was exploring the stories we tell about who we are—and the way that those stories, which often become core to our entire personality, shape our behavior. While we think that we are self-authoring our own lives and fully conscious about how we show up, many of us are working in service to ideas about ourselves and what a “good” woman is, that are not freely chosen.

Joan Miró, Constellation: Toward the Rainbow, 1941, Prints starting at $30, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The great thing about this process is that once you begin to understand that you are telling yourselves stories and not facts, you get to change the story you’re telling yourself. You begin to understand your own power to create a different reality.

Every single time I’m with a group of women and we do a Fact versus Story exercise (a fact is something irrefutable that can be recorded on a video camera; story is everything else), women reflect back that we share many of the same stories and that many of our stories are negative. The negativity is because you can often find fear lurking under our stories (fear of loss of approval, fear of loss of safety and security, fear of loss of control)—and fear is a powerful motivator for behavior. A lot of us do a lot of things in order to perform to the exterior world’s ideas about how a “good” woman behaves. The hope, of course, is that by making these stories conscious, we can choose stories that we like more and are a better fit, that are freely chosen, that offer us the support to show up differently in the world.

Facts vs. Stories

I’ve written about this before, but running through it again is always helpful. When you do this exercise with someone, you take turns asking the prompts (and answering). And then you switch places. The goal is to let your unconscious run. It goes like this:

Tell me a fact about yourself.

Now tell me a story you make up about that fact.

Thank you.

(Repeat. Do this for a few minutes and then switch sides.)

If you’re doing it by yourself, simply pick a fact, and then generate stories. Do this with as many facts as you want. (Obviously, if you want an organized process, get Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness—this is the exercise that you do to kick-off the inquiry into every Sin.)

Here are a few quick examples from me.

Fact: I’m 5’10”.

Stories I tell myself about that fact:

• I’m a big person and will never be “small.”

• I stick out in every room and take up a lot of space.

• If something happens to me my husband won’t be able to pick me up.

• People notice me.

Fact: I traveled 18 days for work in the past six weeks.

Stories I tell myself about that fact:

• I’m failing to show up for my kids.

• I’m missing everything.

• I’m too busy and it’s too much and it’s not fair.

• It’s really hard for me to maintain relationships with friends when I’m never around.

• Things are going to fall through the cracks because I’m the only one who can do things right and so I need to do them all.

This last one—I’m the only one who can do things right, so I should it all—is one of my mega stories, and I workshop it along with you in the Sloth chapter of Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. I get a lot of juice out of this story and it structures a lot of my behavior (and arguably, parts of my personality). It also cuts me off from support, creates burn-out, and is only true because I make it true. (When you micro-manage and gate keep, it’s easy to keep a story like this going!) As mentioned, this story sits on top of fear (fear of loss of control, fear of loss of approval, fear of loss of safety and security). Because it’s such a defining story for me, it kind of hits all of those fear points: In short, I’ve structured my life around being so fast and competent and helpful because I’ve come to believe that people only like me and value me because I make things so easy for them. Why would my husband have married me, or stay married to me, if I didn’t make things so nice for him? (No words my husband has ever said, but again: This is a story and not a fact.)

Because I’ve been dedicated to keeping this story alive in my life, I scan for facts to be able to litigate this story as a fact, too: I was out of town and my husband forgot to remind my youngest to do his homework. (Because I’m the only one who can do things right! Everyone is helpless without me!) I was out of town and they ordered McDonald’s three times! (I get the DoorDash alerts—and everyone is going to die because I’m not there stewarding their nutrition! I’m the only one who can do things right!)

Now that I know this is my story—along with all of my behaviors to try to make this story a fact (answering emails from the school in 30 seconds so I become the default primary parent, guarding passwords and not delegating so I’m the only one who can order hot lunch or get into the medical records, etc.), I am working very hard to shift it because the story…sucks. Not only is it kind of a dumb story, but it’s not entirely true—and it definitely leaves me feeling depleted and resentful. (Again, I’m the one who is insisting on this story—nobody else.)

I love this process; you can do it again, and again, and again.

I was going back through my James Hollis notes and I found the following notes, which take this type of query even farther. The reality is that our stories make us who we are—and they are incredible potent, meaning making, and sometimes live-saving—but there are times when they “bind us to a disabling history.” Many of us are ready for new and different stories, both in our personal lives but in the wider culture.

Here’s Hollis in Living with Borrowed Dust:

* Remember, we are not what happened to us. We are what we wish to become and what wishes to enter life through us.

* We need to bring the epiphenomenal story to consciousness lest its sovereignty over us continue unchallenged.

* We need to see that our stories are fictions, constructs to make sense of experience. Often that sense is reductive and not only denies our resilient powers but binds us to a disabling history.

* We need to ask our stories what they make us do or keep us from doing. This identification is a major step in getting one’s life back. Often the story is invisible, but the behavior is visible and what is rendered visible is something consciousness can attend to, challenge, and transcend.

* We need to realize that our reflexive behaviors and stories are epiphenomena and are not the work of the soul itself. Something within each of us is much larger and calls for our accountability. And something within will support us when we step into the larger shoes that life asks of us.

The larger shoes that Hollis is referring to is a Jung quote: “We all walk in shoes too small for us.”

What Size Are Your Shoes?

Another way to understand the metaphor of the shoes is that we are living in stories about ourselves—some from the culture, some inherited from our family structures—that need to be stretched and rewritten. They don’t fit anymore.

May we write better and more expansive ones.

(If you want to dive into some of your stories—or figure out what they are—come to the AMA on Saturday!)