Stories Of Ourselves Free Pdf 21
Vita Strait
You are trying to get a house full of young children ready to leave the house for school. You have just made yourself a cup of coffee when you hear the phone buzz from the other room. When you return to the hectic kitchen, you notice a beige puddle over the carpet. You look up to the table and see that your mug has been turned on its side. Without even realising it, you have linked A (the coffee stain) to B (the slanted mug), binding these two disparate observations together with the logical explanation that the mug has been knocked over, spilling the coffee you had just made over the floor.
It takes conscious effort to experience the world without interpreting it. Without cause and effect, we would wade through the world like zombies, only aware of the present as a tangle of sensory impressions, unable to make sense of anything.
Whilst our compulsion to fill in the gaps in our experience of the world enables us to make sense of it, it can also cloud our vision. Our ingrained pattern-seeking faculties can cause us to become fixed in ingrained patterns of thinking, jumping to conclusions and misjudging character.
Telling stories like this enables us to impose order on the world. We feel more comfortable with coherent stories, than we do with experiencing the world as it really is, which a lot of the time is random, incoherent and unpredictable.
This occurs in the narrative of our own lives, but also in the way we perceive history. We look back at global events like the Wall Street Crash as the logical result of a number of factors, eliminating the role of randomness, chance and ambiguity.
Being conscious of the stories we tell ourselves prevents us from becoming fixed in the same patterns of behaviour and thought. We can thrive in an unpredictable, changing world in our ability to change the way we exist within it.
So who are you, and who are you becoming? What stories do you tell yourself about life, death, happiness, what you can allow yourself, the kind of work you can do, how much money you can make, the opportunities available to you. What are the stories you tell yourself about your life? Thoreau pondered this at length and said:
And I can only aspire to let go of the stories that no longer serve me or the highest and best good, mindfully and with compassion. I can aspire to release the judgments about good and bad, right or wrong, life or death, all of the dualities held in what I label my experience. And in doing so, I trust all the stories containing my life force somehow blend into a cohesive whole, somehow benefit all beings, are somehow swept into the wispy places where memories go, trusting that like a child blowing bubbles, they are carried away on the breath of giggles.
Terri Schanks is a healer, a coach, a teacher, and a writer. Her educational background includes psychology, philosophy, trauma, spirituality, comparative religions, addictions, hospice, and grief/bereavement. She is also a student of shamanism, Native American healing, healing soul loss/soul retrieval, healing retreats with EMDR, & mindfulness approaches to trauma and grief.
As my story unfolds post-Process, I see how my evolving professional life as a writing coach and teacher integrates with my personal past. There are no good plot lines or bad plot lines, just the stories of our lives. The kind of stories that have staying power, for me, are those that convey meaning and connection.
Our stories can also shape our future, researchers have found. In particular, telling stories of struggle that turn out well may give people the hope they need to live productive lives. And stories that vividly describe turmoil seem to help people grow wiser in the aftermath of major life challenges.
Hagensen excised a passage where she likened boarding the flight to running with the bulls in Spain, and instead skipped ahead to the point of the story: "I fastened my seatbelt low and tight across my hips; I locked my pride in the upright position," she said at a SpeakeasyDC showcase. "I am making it through this flight."
Such a narrative arc, in which challenges give way to triumph, are typical of highly generative adults, McAdams has found. Generativity, a concept pioneered by Erik Erikson, is the desire to provide for future generations and make the world a better place. Highly generative adults, says McAdams, often serve as volunteers, mentors and political activists.
In one study (Journal of Research and Personality, Vol. 34, No. 4), King asked parents to tell the story of discovering that their child had Down syndrome. Immediately after telling their stories, and again two years later, the parents completed measures of subjective well-being and ego development.
Two years later, the parents who had grown happier were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the ones who had written stories with happy endings. "I knew everything would be all right," one woman wrote. "He is as much or more of a blessing to our family as any child could be."
In his research, published in Psychotherapy Research (Vol. 18, No. 6), Adler investigated the stories of 104 adults in outpatient psychotherapy. He found that the patients who told coherent stories tended to report the largest gains in well-being and ego development.
However, the strongest predictor of improvement was when people saw themselves, rather than the therapist, as the central actors in their stories. And, in a yet-unpublished longitudinal study, Adler found that people began feeling better after they began telling stories in which they took control of their lives and their recoveries.
"I would argue that most talking therapy, from cognitive behavioral therapy to psychoanalysis, involves helping people to tell better stories that enrich their lives and help them get past their problems," says McAdams.
I was speaking to a friend recently, for example, who told me she thought that she was about to get a negative performance review at work. Yet the day before, she had told me about some phenomenal praise she received from her boss about a major project she was working on. Somehow, she had forgotten that piece of evidence, and this was causing her to tell a more negative (and less reality-based) story. So we should pay more attention to the good things, and try to weave them into our narratives.
You grew up in a Sufi meetinghouse, where twice a week dervishes would come over to your home to meditate, tell stories, and drink tea. Your family had a real sense of community. For the Sufis, the goal was to diminish their egos so that they could grow closer to a higher reality that we might call God. If Western society is increasingly secular, how can society find ways to minimize its ego to find greater resiliency within themselves?
In my book, I write about how the four pillars of meaning can help us build more resilience. As a reminder, they are belonging, purpose, transcendence, and storytelling. People who have these pillars in their lives are able to weather the major and minor adversities of life with more fortitude, and to experience growth in the face of them.
I'm currently reading Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens by Eric O. Jacobsen and loving every page of it. In it, Jacobsen defines the contours of what he calls "our crisis of belonging", and it's so much more than moralizing about people's social media habits.
Telling ourselves more hopeful stories about other people starts with exposing ourselves to the more hopeful interactions of relationships, especially public ones. It may begin with ignoring the shrill ping of a smartphone for long enough to ask the barista about her favourite drink, and it might end with an unlikely development. As we engage the people around us in the place we live our lives, we just might cease monopolizing the starring role in the stories we tell ourselves.
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And while these stories may be deeply ingrained within us, they are not fixed. They impact how we perceive ourselves and the world around us, and consequently how we act. In positive and negative ways. The butterflies in my stomach were having a revolt and I felt I needed to have a meeting with them.
So, I sat down and started unpacking. I listed everything that was making me uncomfortable, and outlined what I felt were some gaps. Then I called a friend with complementary skills, bought him a matcha latte and talked it through. The conversation made me see my self-imposed storyline more clearly. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Conveying information in the form of stores activates more brain regions than getting a rational explanation. Also, the narrative process leaves physical and emotional imprints that make the information getting from the story more easily remembered, for longer periods of time.
Our stories can provide a sense of continuity and meaning in our lives, but they can also limit us if they become too rigid or narrow. It is important to be aware of the stories we tell ourselves and to be open to changing and adapting them as needed.
The concept refers to the narratives and beliefs we create about ourselves, others, and the world around us. These stories can shape our perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. And furthermore, how these perceptions and beliefs materialize in our lives.
By understanding the stories we tell ourselves and actively working to create new, empowering stories, we can manifest the life we want to live. Many people believe that by actively working to create a positive narrative, we can create positive changes in our lives.
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