Day 19: The Story You Keep Telling
Week 3 Rewiring
Everybody has a story about themselves. A narrative that runs underneath the day-to-day self-talk, explaining who you are and why you do what you do. Most of the time, you’re not even aware you’re telling it. It’s just there, running quietly in the background, colouring everything.
I want to tell you about a patient I’ll call Fred, because his story is one of the clearest examples I’ve come across of just how powerful, and how limiting, this kind of narrative can be.
Fred’s Story
Fred came to see me convinced he was, in his words, just not a finisher. He’d start projects with enthusiasm and then abandon them a few weeks in. A course, a business idea, a home renovation, a fitness plan. Each time, the same pattern. Each time, the story got a little stronger: I’m the sort of person who doesn’t finish things.
By the time I met him, Fred had turned this into a complete identity. He’d tell people about it at parties, almost proudly, as though it were a fixed personality trait rather than a pattern of behaviour. He’d stopped starting new things altogether, because why bother, when he already knew how the story ended.
We spent some time together unpicking that story. Not by arguing with it directly, which rarely works, but by asking where it came from and whether it was actually true in the way Fred believed it to be.
It turned out Fred had finished plenty of things. He’d finished his degree. He’d finished raising two children into reasonably well-adjusted adults. He’d finished paying off a mortgage over twenty-five years. What he hadn’t finished were the things that had lost his interest along the way, which, when you think about it, describes most people most of the time.
The story Fred had been telling himself wasn’t a lie exactly. It was a selective, distorted account, built from the memorable failures and blind to the unremarkable successes. And once he’d built it, everything afterwards got filtered through it. Every abandoned hobby confirmed the story. Every finished task got quietly filed away as not counting, an exception rather than the pattern it actually was.
Why Your Story Matters
The story you tell about yourself isn’t a neutral description. It actively shapes what you notice, what you remember, and what you attempt in the first place. If your story is I’m not a finisher, you’ll notice every unfinished project and forget every finished one. If your story is I’m someone who copes, you’ll notice the times you coped and forget the times you struggled.
This isn’t about positive thinking for the sake of it. It’s about accuracy. Most people’s stories about themselves are inaccurate in a specific direction: they’re built from the worst moments, generalised into a permanent trait, and then defended against contrary evidence.
Finding Your Own Story
Take a moment and ask yourself: what’s the story I tell about myself? Not the polished version you’d give in a job interview, but the one that runs underneath, the one you half-believe when things go wrong.
I’m not good under pressure. I always let people down. I’m just not academic. I’m the disorganised one in the family. Write it down if it helps.
Then do what we did with Fred. Go looking for the exceptions. Not to prove the story completely wrong, most stories have some grain of truth in them, but to see whether the story is really the whole picture, or just the loudest, most memorable part of it.
Rewriting the Story
Fred didn’t leave our work together with a brand new story where he finishes everything without fail. That wouldn’t have been true either, and an equally distorted story in the other direction is just as unhelpful. What he left with was a more accurate one: I usually finish the things that matter to me, and I let go of the things that stop mattering, and that’s alright.
That’s the goal here. Not to swap one exaggerated story for another, but to build one that’s actually accurate, one that includes the full picture rather than just the parts your low moods and setbacks have taught you to notice.
Your story isn’t fixed. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s an account you’ve been building, one memory at a time, and it can be revised the same way, one memory, one exception, one piece of evidence at a time.
References
- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press.
- Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- McAdams, D.P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100-122.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt.
- Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Knopf.