The Stories We Tell Ourselves

There’s the life you’re living, and then there’s the story you’re telling yourself about it. The two are closely connected, although they are rarely identical.

We interpret what happens to us, decide what it means and connect it with what we already believe about ourselves, other people and the world. Over time, these interpretations can settle into familiar narratives: this is the sort of person I am; this is what happens to me; this is what I can expect.

These stories help organise experience. They can also become so familiar that we stop recognising them as interpretations and begin to experience them as facts.

Putting feelings into words

Research into affect labelling offers an interesting example of how putting experience into words can influence emotional processing.

In a well-known fMRI study, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues asked participants to view photographs of faces expressing emotions such as fear and anger. In one condition, participants matched emotional faces with other faces. In another, they chose a word such as angry or afraid to describe the expression they were seeing.

When participants labelled the emotion, activity in the amygdala and other limbic regions decreased, while activity increased in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, an area involved in cognitive control and regulation. Greater activation in this prefrontal region was associated with lower amygdala activation, suggesting that translating emotional information into language can alter the way it is processed.

The finding is more specific than the popular idea that “naming your feelings calms your brain”. The study involved labelling emotional stimuli under laboratory conditions. It does, however, provide evidence that putting emotional experience into words engages regulatory processes in the brain.

Later research has found similar effects across subjective and physiological measures of emotional responding. Affect labelling is sometimes described as a form of incidental emotion regulation because people may experience a regulatory effect without consciously trying to change how they feel.

In psychological work, this connects with the value of being able to identify and describe an experience with some precision. I’m noticing anxiety leaves more room for reflection than something terrible is going to happen. I feel ashamed carries a different meaning from I am fundamentally inadequate. Naming the emotional experience can help separate the feeling itself from the conclusions that quickly gather around it.

Our familiar stories

Individual thoughts and emotions often sit inside larger narratives about who we are. Someone who has repeatedly managed difficult circumstances may come to see themselves as the capable one: the person who copes, gets on with things and finds a way through. That identity may be built around a sense of competence and self-reliance. It may also make needing help unexpectedly uncomfortable, because vulnerability or dependence feels inconsistent with the person they have learned to be.

Another person may organise their sense of self around being useful to others. Perhaps being responsible, helpful or highly attuned to other people became an important part of relationships early in life. Caring for others may remain a deeply held value, while an identity built around being needed can make limits, receiving care and attending to personal needs more difficult.

For someone who has experienced repeated disappointment, loss or adversity, the prevailing story may become one of powerlessness: things don’t work out for me; other people have choices I don’t have; nothing I do makes much difference. Painful circumstances can understandably shape expectations. Over time, however, a description of past experience can begin to feel like a prediction about the future.

These narratives persist partly because they usually contain some truth. You may genuinely have been strong, needed or repeatedly disappointed. The difficulty comes when one part of experience grows large enough to obscure everything else.

Fitting the evidence to the story

Once we develop a settled idea about ourselves or the world, attention tends to organise itself around that expectation. Information that fits an existing belief is easier to notice and remember, while contradictory information may carry less weight.

If I believe that people cannot be relied upon, the person who cancels becomes compelling evidence. The many occasions when somebody follows through may register only briefly. If I believe I am incompetent, a mistake can seem highly significant while dozens of things I manage adequately barely count. If my story is that nothing ever works out, disappointments fit neatly into the narrative while positive exceptions are dismissed as luck.

This process is one reason personal narratives can become self-reinforcing. The story influences what receives our attention, and what we notice strengthens the story. Psychological change often begins with recognising the point at which an event has acquired an additional meaning. This relationship ended can become people always leave me. I handled that badly can become I ruin everything. I’m frightened about this can become I won’t be able to cope.

When the conclusion has been rehearsed often enough, the event and the interpretation can feel almost inseparable.

Holding the story more lightly

Psychological flexibility involves developing some room to examine these familiar conclusions. Useful questions might include: What am I telling myself this means? How much of this is observation and how much is interpretation? What evidence am I giving the most weight? What doesn’t quite fit the story? Is an old conclusion being applied to a new situation?

These questions allow for a fuller account of experience. Sadness can still be sadness. Anger may signal that something important has happened. Anxiety may be responding to genuine uncertainty or risk. At the same time, we can remain curious about the broader conclusions that attach themselves to those feelings. You can have been strong and still need support. You can care deeply for others and have limits. You can have been hurt and retain agency. You can have struggled before without knowing exactly what will happen next.

Our personal narratives help us make sense of the past, yet they become restrictive when they begin predicting the future with too much certainty. We have limited control over many of the experiences that shape us. We often have more influence over how rigidly we hold the meanings we have made from them.

A useful question for reflection, then, is:

What story have I built around what happened, what does that story leave out, and does it still give me enough room to respond differently now?