What if Your Stories Are the Root Cause of Your Problems?

"We are story-telling animals. Stories are our core sense-making tools. We constantly spin narratives in our head - about the world, other people, what we are doing and seeing. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are especially important. They shape our sense of identity, our interpretations of our past and our expectations for our future. [1] What is more, they also significantly determine our overall sense of well-being and life-satisfaction. [2]"

"We constantly filter, select and interpret information, and then we establish relationships of cause and effect. However, we are story-telling animals with serious blinkers on, prone to various cognitive biases. We are particularly unreliable narrators when it comes to our own self-story-the story we have built over time to explain who we are and how we have come to be. Our self-story curates selective moments, characters, and circumstances of our life into a coherent whole."

Humans constantly narrativize experience, using stories as core sense-making tools that form identity, interpret the past, and set expectations for the future. Self-stories shape attention, memory selection, and emotional responses, profoundly influencing life satisfaction and wellbeing. Those narratives filter information through cognitive biases, producing curated accounts that may be generative or destructive. Many self-stories operate subconsciously as an inner voice that selects scenes to remember and that continually comments on present events. Common toxic self-stories manifest as patterns of self-blame or blaming the world, undermining resilience and limiting interpretations of challenges and possibilities.

Read at Psychology Today