The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust
In the previous chapter, we examined reactive mind’s unquenchable desire to generate cause-and-effect relationships in order to help you make sense of the world. We gave this feature of reactive mind a name—reason giving—and showed you how the reasons used by depressed individuals tend to be both negatively biased and inaccurate. Among depressed people, biased reason giving plays a major role in triggering self-isolation, social avoidance, depressed mood, and rumination. To counteract the negative impact of reason giving, it is important to be aware of and just hold your reasons, without buying into them. This allows you to refocus your attention on the present moment and then accept and see the antics of the reactive mind for what they are. This will activate wise mind, help you reconnect with your values, and redirect your energy toward powerful, healthy life purposes.
It’s one thing to explain your behavior in a particular situation, such as why you didn’t exercise today or why you yelled at your kids this morning. But the reactive mind isn’t content with developing reasons on a case-by-case basis; it wants to assemble all of these cause-and-effect explanations—often going back into childhood—to create a story of you. In ACT, we call this a self-story. The Dalai Lama calls it the conceptual self. This is the story that you carry around about who you are, how you got to be that way, and what is likely to happen to you as time goes by. Obviously, depending upon what is contained in your self-story, you could see yourself as anything from a broken, worthless, and unlovable person with no real future to a person full of good intentions, compassion, vitality, meaning, and purpose.
It isn’t a big leap to think of the self-story as a kind of operator’s manual. In that sense, we all carry around our own operator’s manual. It necessarily allows us to have an overriding sense of life direction and purpose. The problem arises when the operator’s manual is biased, misleading, or inaccurate, as it often turns out to be in depression. If you buy into the operating instructions of your depressed self-story, and then do what they tell you to do, you might easily find yourself not going where you would like to go in life.
Fortunately, if you pause a second and see your self-story as just that—a story—you’ll be in a good position to act in ways that will promote the kind of life you want to live. Holding your self-stories lightly is the sixth mindful step on your nine-step path to living a fulfilling life. To help you take your self-story with a grain of salt, we’ll expose it for what it is: an inaccurate, negatively biased, and selectively filtered narrative that’s full of holes and inconsistencies. To help you learn how to do this, we will first examine what neuroscience has to say about self-stories. We will give you the opportunity to look at your current self-story with an eye toward helping it seem a tad less important than it is now. At the end of the chapter, we will expose you to some cutting-edge brain training exercises that will help you detach from your self-story, smile at it in a slightly amused and compassionate way, and connect with the positive emotion circuitry in your brain.
Let’s take a look at how self-stories work, often to the detriment of the depressed person. When a person accumulates a succession of setbacks and disappointments, the reactive mind tends to fall back on increasingly general explanations for the setbacks, such as, “I just never get it right” or “I’m the kind of person who always fails at relationships.” These types of self-statements are really summaries of hundreds of reasons that have been lumped together to form a self-concept about who you are. Research into what is called autobiographical memory clearly demonstrates an exaggerated tendency among depressed people to retrieve emotional themes rather than specific situational events and details when recalling earlier life events (Williams et al. 2000). Interestingly enough, this memory bias basically disappears after mindfulness training, suggesting that clouded, emotionally themed memories create problems with being aware and in the moment—until the mindfulness fix is applied (Williams 2010).
As the self-story becomes increasingly theme oriented and overly general, the second part of the self-story sequence kicks in. This involves the reactive mind delving into your life history to explain how you developed into the person you are. For example, “My dad was an alcoholic and depressed, and I picked up a lot of his traits.” Sometimes you’ll seize upon past events, such as childhood trauma, as the cause for current setbacks (“I’ve always felt like I’m damaged—irreversibly damaged—since I was raped as a teenager, and it’s stupid to think I could have a normal intimate relationship”). At other times, your story might suggest that you are simply imbued with a particular trait that explains why bad things happen to you (“I’ve never had much motivation for anything. I’ve always been just kind of lazy, even as a child, and I don’t think I’ll ever be successful at anything that requires a lot of effort”).
When your self-story portrays you in flawed and broken terms, it can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think of the self-story as accurate and set in concrete, you face a very real danger of attaching to it and making it the story of “you.” This allows your story to intrude into and color your experience of the present and, worse yet, to subtly or not so subtly shape your future.
Storytelling is of primary importance to human beings. One important thing to remember is that self-stories are not just attempts to make sense of personal history; they also serve an important social function. They help us make contact with other humans and allow us to communicate our needs in various ways. They create a high-level pathway for bonding (and mating) with other members of the social group. They allow us to compare our behaviors with others and to stop behaviors that might result in exclusion from the social group (Somerville, Kelly, and Heatherton 2010).
The area of the brain most responsible for generating self-stories is the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The mPFC produces representations of the self that integrate historical and contemporary social and self-referential information drawn from other regions of the brain (Wagner, Haxby, and Heatherton 2012). Positive self-stories result in correlated activity of the mPFC and areas of the brain that produce reward sensations and motivation. Negative self-stories are associated with both decreased activation of the ventral orbital prefrontal cortex and decoupling of the neural pathways linked to the brain’s reward and motivation centers (Hughes and Beer 2013). Chavez and Heatherton (2014) found that individual differences in the emotional tone of self-stories (from positive to negative) are correlated with density of white matter and heightened activation of frontostriatal circuits linking areas underlying self-related thinking to ones involved in positive self-evaluation.
It appears that frontostriatal circuits may give rise to feelings of self-esteem by integrating information about the self with positive emotions and reward. To the extent that an individual regularly experiences positive self-stories, it is possible that the repeated recruitment of the frontostriatal circuits may increase the structural integrity (density) of white matter tracts within this system over time. This, in turn, may then lead to an increase in the likelihood of positive self-stories.
The take-home message is consistent with our emphasis on brain training to promote greater levels of mindfulness: Positively framed stories stimulate and strengthen the brain’s reward and motivation circuitry. Harsh, negative self-stories cut this connection and strengthen emotional and behavioral avoidance neural pathways.
One important property of stories is that they condense a vast array of information into a much smaller number of simple, powerful messages. This means that your self-story is not the complete, unabridged autobiography of your life. It would be impossible for you to recall every consecutive moment of your life since you became conscious. That book would have too many pages to count. So you have to selectively remember information about events, interactions, emotional reactions, your behaviors, and so on. In order to present a plausible account of who you are, where you are in life, how you got to be there, and where you’re going, your story contains a combination of descriptive elements (objective facts about things that happened) and highly selective cause-and-effect assumptions (your explanation of how these events shaped you). Taken together, these two elements form a limited set of simple, powerful, and often destructive messages about who you are.
When your self-story suggests that you are defective or flawed in some basic way, the stage is set for you to enter situations expecting to fail, be rejected, or be disappointed. You may behave like someone who is expecting bad things to happen and, sure enough, bad things happen.
Do you recall Kevin from chapter 9? His self-story was that he was a failure, and he had many reasons that he used to justify it:
I’m a failure because I let my buddies down during a mission in Afghanistan, where two died and I survived.
I’m a failure because I dropped out of school and botched my dream of becoming a nurse.
I’m a failure because I couldn’t maintain a relationship with my girlfriend.
I’m a failure because I misused alcohol.
Fortunately, when you step back and look at how your story line originates and operates, you’ll begin to see a lot of holes that you hadn’t noticed before. Let’s take a look at some of these holes.
The self-story is vulnerable to “truthiness” mistakes—mistakes we make in accepting something as fact based on it sounding right, or having a ring of truth to it, rather than it being accurate. Stories that have that ring of truth to them often do so because they capitalize on our love of cause-and-effect reason giving, a specialty of reactive mind. They seem logically organized and even plausible in tone. But, at the end of the day, they are just one of many “logical” stories that could be (and will be) spun by the reactive mind.
As you become more skillful in working with your mind, your self-story will continue to show up, but it won’t command your attention with the same urgency as when you were indiscriminately buying whatever thoughts your reactive mind offered. Let’s look at one self-story example: “I’ll always have problems with depression because my parents rejected me when I told them I was gay. They taught me to be ashamed of myself and never accept myself for who I am.” This is less compelling when seen as a part of a personal history that is just that—history—no matter how painful it seems.
This idea that the truth is not out there is a different take on the slogan for the popular TV show, the X-Files. We are socialized to believe that truth resides in the world outside of us and our job is to go out and find it. In ACT, we take a completely different approach to determining what is true and what is false. There is no idealized truth “out there” for you to discover. Instead, we talk about the truth value of a self-story. This means that a self-story is measured by its value in promoting your best interests in whatever situation you use the story. If the story helps you succeed in that situation, then it is a functionally true story. If you have a compelling, logical, and well-organized self-story that systematically defeats your interests, then that story is functionally false.
The ACT approach can be a challenge to grasp in this regard. You’re no doubt pondering some important questions:
If I can’t accurately describe the true causes of my behavior in the present moment, how can I explain cause-and-effect relationships for events that happened years ago?
How can I recognize when my self-story is operating?
How do I know if my self-story is accurate?
How can my self-story be accurate when so much information is left out of it?
In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll try to help you answer these important questions and learn to relate to your self-story in a more flexible, productive way.
Memory retrieval is the core process that feeds any self-story. If you don’t have a memory, you can’t have a self-story. The trouble with memory retrieval, as we explained in the previous chapter, is that it is incredibly emotion dependent. In depression in particular, there is a strong negative cognitive bias leading to selective recall of negative information. This continually primes the pump with distressing memories, thoughts, sensations, and resulting emotions. This then interferes with your ability to regulate strong, unpleasant emotional states (Joorman and Vanderlind 2014). If you will recall, when we are sad, we tend to easily recall other sad events. But there are other problems with memory that are highly specific to depression that create even more cause for concern about the accuracy of a depressed self-story. Let’s take a look at what some of the recent research has revealed.
One very interesting line of study has looked at the impact rumination has on memory in depressed people. Rumination is a very unpleasant state of mind, so depressed people tend to try to suppress negative thoughts and memories as a way of stopping rumination. Unfortunately, the attempt to suppress unpleasant memories backfires; the more you try to suppress negative memories to control your thoughts and mood, the more negative, intrusive memories and thoughts you receive in what’s sometimes referred to as the memory suppression effect (Dalgleish and Yiend 2006).
What does this mean in terms of your ability to recall your past accurately? Basically, you will remember more negative events than positive events because you artificially move negative memories up in the line of retrieval when you try to suppress them. When you’re depressed, rumination, attempts to stop ruminating, and the memory suppression effect together create a self-story that includes way more negative events than positive events. The trap is that you aren’t aware of this filtering bias because it operates outside of awareness. Here’s another interesting fact: When depressed people learn mindfulness strategies, allowing them to detach from their self-story, they ruminate less and perform normally on memory tasks involving emotional themes (Williams et al. 2000; Williams 2010).
In this section, we give you multiple opportunities to become aware of how rapidly and automatically self-stories can get generated. The goal is to show you how capable this aspect of reactive mind is and why you need to be skeptical about the truth value and workability of your stories.
The Life Story Wheel
At the end of the popular game show Wheel of Fortune, contestants spin the wheel to see what kind of prize they’ll win. This is a random encounter with luck that significantly heightens the excitement of the game. In this exercise, we have a similar game in mind, but the prize is a little different. In this game, you get to construct a new self-story based on a random word choice. The life story wheel is loaded with evaluative words that are likely to move your mind into spinning a yarn right away.
One way to start the game is to close your eyes, put your finger on the story wheel, and start with the word closest to your finger. Alternatively, you might roll a penny onto the page, see where it lands, and start from there.
Once you have spun the wheel, so to speak, and have a word, begin your story: “I am [whatever word you landed on]” and then let your mind go to work adding details. You’re likely to get the best results if you write your story quickly. If your hand stops writing, write the first sentence again (“I am ”) and continue on. Write at least one paragraph—you’ll refer to it in the next worksheet. Repeat this process for four or five words. If your penny drops on the same word twice, pick it up and drop it again! Your penny isn’t trying to tell you something, or is it?
I am
I am
I am
I am
Now, move on to the next worksheet. When you answer the questions, you may simply write yes or no, or you can elaborate.
Life Story Wheel Worksheet
Further Exploration. Were you able to construct four or five stories by just playing this little game? If you’re like most people, it wasn’t at all difficult, which shows you the power of your built-in storyteller. How credible did each story seem? It’s usually possible to construct a story that seems very credible even though it’s obviously made up on the fly. Were the stories based on negative words easier for you to believe than the positive stories? If so, you were probably being phished by your reactive mind. The real irony is you couldn’t have completed this game without your reactive mind, because it handles explanations, reason giving, and storytelling. If we got you into wise mind mode and asked you to do something like this, it would strike you as an odd thing indeed! Why would anyone want to spend their precious time making up painful stories?
When Kevin dropped a penny on the story wheel, he came up with the words “inadequate,” “perfect,” “brilliant,” and “flaky” and wrote the following paragraphs.
Kevin’s Life Story Wheel Worksheet
When Kevin reviewed his responses, he noticed it was easier to create stories using negative rather than positive words. At the same time, he was interested in the fact that even a small part of a positive story (which he rarely experienced in his internal dialogue) seemed plausible as well. He was surprised to find that he had pretty much forgotten about the act of generosity toward his elderly neighbor or that he was actually pretty crafty with home repairs.
Write an Autobiography
The best way to access your whole story is to take some time and write a condensed version of your story line. Since a complete autobiography would be too big a challenge, we want you to write a smaller version. Don’t do this halfheartedly. Take some time to think about everything that has happened in your life and how you feel these events have shaped you; then take a half hour or so and write a one- or two-page autobiography. You may find it helpful to first write out specific events before you go on to construct your autobiography. Here’s a list of the types of things you might include:
• Formative events in your life and how they’ve affected you
• Things that stand out as high points in your life
• Things that stand out as low points in your life
• Relationships with parents, siblings, and other family members
• Important intimate relationships and friendships and what they’ve meant to you
• Specific traumas or negative life events that had an impact on you
Ruth’s Story
Ruth is a thirty-four-year-old single woman who lives by herself. She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and she believed this would always limit her ability to have good relationships with men, a problem compounded after being date-raped in college. During college, she had dated a man for several years and had even lived with him for almost a year, but she had never enjoyed intimacy with him. She intentionally discouraged any talk of commitment, and they gradually drifted apart.
Following the predictions of her self-story, she decided that she just wasn’t relationship material and stopped trying to meet men. She had very few other social connections and spent a lot of time alone, trying to forget about her misfortune and get on with the life she could create, given her losses. She began to experience more and more self-consciousness at work, where she worked with men and women and could detect flirtation and sexual interest in their interactions. She knew that the people she worked with were well intentioned when they tried to set her up for a blind date, but she didn’t feel safe and planned to avoid any future exploitation. Gradually, her depression worsened to the point that she had to take a disability leave from work so she could get her life back together.
Here is the autobiography she wrote:
I was the only child in my family. My father was in sales, and we moved a lot. I think the longest I was in any school was two years. I had few close friends because I knew we would move again. I always was the “new kid,” so I was often teased by my classmates. I was a pretty good student, but I never felt I fit in socially. Being alone so much caused me to be very shy and unsure of myself, something I still deal with today.
My biggest role model was my mother. I lived with her after Mom and Dad divorced. She taught me to adjust to being alone because she was alone. She had to work two jobs to support us, but she never complained about how hard it was to make a living. She just did what she had to do to support us.
The babysitter who abused me was our neighbor. He told me that I would be taken away from my mother and put in an orphanage if I told anyone. I remember wanting to tell Mom to make him stop, but I would always chicken out. I blame myself for not telling her sooner. She would have done something to stop it. Instead, it stopped when his family moved out of state. I was even more suspicious of people after this.
I went to college at eighteen and it was hard on me. I didn’t feel comfortable going to social events, so I just stayed in my room or went to the library. I had an attraction to a few guys, but they didn’t seem to notice me. I took a part-time job and kept a full class load, so I didn’t have much time to socialize, but I still felt lonely. In my sophomore year, I went with a friend to a party where everybody was drinking. I’d never drank much before and it hit me hard. I didn’t remember the end of the evening, except trying to push a guy off of me. I felt really afraid and ashamed at the same time. During my junior year, I met a mannamed Dave, and we became close friends. He was interested in sex, and though I wasn’t, I went along with it. We lived together for a while, but relating to him just seemed to take too much time and effort, so I found a summer job in a different part of the state and left him.
Now, I just try to keep to myself and stay out of the middle of any social drama at work. My workmates are nice people, and they often invite me to social activities, but I always tell them that I have to go home and take care of my two dogs. I don’t feel that social drive that other people do. I prefer to stay at home and clean or watch movies or do crafts. I don’t see a relationship or marriage in my future. I’m not sure I’d be a very good parent because I would probably teach my kids to not trust other people.
With a little assistance, Ruth was able to deconstruct her story so that descriptions of objective life events were separated from arbitrary cause-and-effect, reason-giving explanations. Below are some of the results of the exercise.
Ruth’s Worksheet for Deconstructing My Autobiography
When you read Ruth’s story, did you pick up on how few descriptions of events there are relative to the number of cause-and-effect impacts? Also, did you notice that there are only a limited number of themes appearing and reappearing in terms of cause-and-effect impacts? Her main themes are: avoid being close because people can be cruel, and I am not a social person, just a loner, and probably always will be. This reveals how Ruth’s self-story has selectively included life events that represent a very simple, powerful theme: Let your guard down, and you’ll get hurt.
Deconstruct Your Autobiography
Now it’s your turn to break down your self-story into its basic elements. Just as we did with Ruth’s story, divide the statements you wrote in your Autobiography exercise into two categories: descriptions and cause-and-effect impacts. Make a copy of the blank worksheet (or print it from http://www.newharbinger.com/38457) before proceeding, as you’ll use it again in the next exercise. (Alternatively, make a copy after you’ve filled in the left-hand column and before filling in the right-hand column.)
In the left-hand column, record statements that are factual descriptions of occurrences—things you did or that happened to you. This might include such things as, “My brother died in an automobile accident when I was twelve,” “My parents divorced when I was two,” “I was bullied for two years in middle school,” or “I graduated from college with honors when I was twenty-two.”
In the right-hand column, record statements that address the impacts of the events contained in your descriptions. These are the cause-and-effect explanations you give for the objective events of your life, such as, “After my brother died, my parents argued a lot, and they stopped paying attention to me or my choice of friends,” “I was the oldest and took the role of parenting my brothers and sister when I was nine and my dad left,” or “Once I became overweight, I felt anxious around most of the kids at school and just preferred to stay at home and read or watch movies rather than be around them outside of school.”
Worksheet for Deconstructing My Autobiography
Further Exploration. Take a look at your descriptions and consider ways to work with those descriptions other than or in addition to the statements written in the corresponding cause-and-effect boxes. Are there other descriptions or cause-and-effect statements that you want to add in? Chances are you will see two or three main themes in your story. Self-stories are like that: light on objective facts and heavy on a limited number of simple but powerful (and often self-limiting) messages.
Write a New Autobiography
The themes of your self-story are usually contained in cause-and-effect impact statements within the story. But what if the impact statements of your self-story are limited by selective memory bias or your sheer inability to integrate the millions of other possibly influential experiences you’ve had by now?
Let’s try an experiment that will involve consciously stepping outside of your existing self-story for a few minutes. You’ll use the copy you made of the previous worksheet. Without changing the descriptions of actual occurrences, write out new cause-and-effect impacts of each event. We don’t care what type of new impacts you ascribe to it. Your new version can increase the negative impact of an event, decrease it, or offer a different meaning altogether.
For example, Ruth’s statement that the experience of sexual abuse “Made it difficult to trust others. Also, made me feel ashamed and different from others” could be revised to “made me more sensitive to others who have been victimized in some way and contributed to my interest in social work” or “made me appreciate how courageous it is to make yourself vulnerable” or “made me a feminist.” Before you start, take a look at Ruth’s Revised Deconstruction of My Autobiography.
Ruth’s Revised Deconstruction of My Autobiography
As you see, Ruth came up with lots of new material for the cause-and-effect column. She felt empowered by this exercise. Now, rewrite your new autobiography, and then continue reading.
Worksheet for Revised Deconstruction of My Autobiography
Further Exploration. Were you able to come up with a different set of meanings for the same set of facts? Most people find that this is relatively easy to do, but if you struggled with it, just notice that you might have attached to your self-story so completely that it eliminated any access to a different set of meanings. Did you find yourself saying something like, “Yeah, I can write these other meanings, but they aren’t really true. My original story is the true one!” If you went that route, here’s a question to ask yourself: “How do I know that my first story is the most accurate and true?” It’s probably the one you’ve been reciting for a long time, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most accurate. This fickle feature of self-stories is what we alluded to when we talked a little earlier about “truthiness errors” in self-stories. Just because a story is familiar, well practiced, and might even seem plausible doesn’t mean it’s true!
Is it possible that your reactive mind is similarly arbitrary in constructing your story, rather than entirely accurate? If your story is full of being exploited or abused by others, might your reactive mind filter out an event where a person respected you and gave generously to you? If your story contains one failure after another, could it be that your reactive mind has screened out the times you have succeeded?
Stories have a way of taking on a life of their own, and when they do, you can find yourself playing out the prophecies of failure, betrayal, disappointment, or personal inadequacy contained in your story. Living your life with your attention riveted on your self-story is a little like trying to drive a car by fixing your gaze on the rearview mirror, not the road; it’s ineffective at best and usually downright dangerous. Although you do need a rearview mirror to profit from past experiences, you will never reach your destination if you remain focused on the view it affords. As we say in ACT: The most dangerous thing about the story of your past is that you could make it into the story of your future.
After Ruth did the autobiography exercises, she made a conscious effort to adopt a new story about herself, one that reflected more respect for her strengths. Day by day, she began to notice the limiting effects of her old self-story and what it told her to do: remain alone and stand guard against the world. This operator instruction put her in the position of giving up on the things that she actually valued in life. She wanted to have close friendships with men and women. She wanted to invite people to her home. She realized that she needed to keep an eye out for her old self-story so that it didn’t rob her of opportunities for living the life she wanted. Because she had lived with it and obeyed it for so long, she couldn’t keep it from showing up in situations in which she felt vulnerable. But she did get better and better at noticing that it had been activated. She could switch her attention over to the new, more empowering story that seemed to give her better results in situations in which she felt vulnerable.
Ruth made a commitment to start with a small change: she would say yes rather than no to invitations to participate in social activities with her work peers. She used the nickname strategy (chapter 8) to name her story “Lonely Girl.” This stopped her from attaching to her old self-story as she experimented with becoming a more social person. Since she valued building trust, genuineness, and candor in relationships, she committed to following those values in her social interactions: being honest about her feelings, letting others know that she cared about developing closer connections, and assuming that people had integrity and would spend more time with her if they wanted to get to know her.
Over time, Ruth noticed that, even though she had some unpleasant inner experiences in social situations, she was feeling healthier physically and emotionally. Her old self-story was still there, but not in the dark, oppressive way it had been before. Ruth noticed that she was actually having fun and enjoying herself at the exact moment her old self-story would appear in awareness and tell her to run for the hills. And, like a rebellious teenager, Ruth simply chose to disobey the toxic advice of her reactive mind and focus on her new self-story. Ruth was on the path toward living a vital life!
Strengthening the skills needed to better manage the impact of self-stories involves first learning to be skeptical of any single self-story that claims to be the true and complete version of you. In addition, since it appears that the main impact of negative stories on the brain is to weaken neural pathways that produce rewards and a desire to approach (rather than avoid) life events, you must learn to diversify your stories so that positive self-story elements get equal airtime, so to speak.
In depression, the tendency is to just pile one negative self-story on top of another so that there is no breath of fresh air. Keep in mind that we are not saying that positive self-stories are any more believable than negative ones. They are all stories. But at least forcing yourself to rehearse positive self-story elements will begin to strengthen those reward circuits!
Tell Me A Story
Imagine that you are in three distinctly different types of social situations, and in each of these situations a person is going to ask you a question: “Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?”
First situation: You are at a social gathering and you are interested in getting to know a specific person better. This person might become just a friend, or you might develop a deeper relationship over time.
Write what you would say:
Second situation: You are applying for a job you really want and are at an interview that will likely determine whether you get the job or not.
Write what you would say:
Third situation: You are new to a church or spiritual group, after being invited to attend by one of your friends. After a brief round of introductions, the group leader asks you to tell the group a little about yourself.
Write what you would say:
Further Exploration. What did you discover as you did this exercise? Did you notice that you tailored the story of yourself to fit the social demands of each situation? Is there any aspect of any of your stories that is not true? Which one of these stories is the “true” one? Most people are surprised at how pliable their stories are; they can change from situation to situation. That’s exactly what you want: tailor your story to the context, hold it lightly, and notice how well it works. Stories that produce the outcomes you want are the true ones.
Narrative Journal
To further explore your self-story, you might want to keep a daily self-story journal. We’ve provided you with an easy-to-use worksheet (or you can download a copy from http://www.newharbinger.com/38457). The instructions are simple: Each time you find yourself in a new, distinctive social situation where you are required to disclose personal information about yourself, write that situation down in the left-hand column. Then, write down the contents of your new self-story in that situation in the right-hand column.
As an example, in the Storytelling Situation column you might write: “Went to the grocery store to buy some stuff, and the checker started talking about how hard it is to live with someone who is hardheaded. The clerk said, ‘You know what I mean?’” In the Self-Narrative column you might write: “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m one of those hardheaded types. I figure that I’m needed to balance my partner’s easygoing manner. Wouldn’t want too much easygoing energy in the house now, would we?’ The checker laughed.”
Just keep a running tab of all of the new self-stories that you generate over time. You will be mightily impressed by your storytelling abilities!
Narrative Journal Worksheet
Further Exploration. Remember what we said about truth earlier in this chapter? None of your stories are true in the pure sense. Truth in storyland is based in how well the story serves your best interests in each new situation. A story can be a complete success in one situation and a complete failure when applied to a different one. If you can look at your stories this way, you will be able to flexibly shift between stories depending upon your needs in each situation.
Priming the Pump: Positive Memory Rehearsal
As mentioned earlier, depressed individuals tend to spend inordinate amounts of time playing and replaying their negative self-stories, to the detriment of the reward and motivation circuitry in the brain. On a daily basis, give your positive brain circuitry a workout by identifying and replaying positive life memories. Spend at least 15 minutes practicing this exercise, maybe at the conclusion of your day or in the morning before you get started.
Use the “Life Story Wheel” exercise, but this time randomly select two or three positive words. After practicing deep breathing to get present for a few minutes, picture a prior situation, event, or interaction in which you experienced a positive, rewarding moment. The memory could be from any time in your life, from early childhood to the present. Take your time and put all the details of the memory in place so that you feel like you are right back there. Just bask in the glow of that moment.
Further Exploration. When you did this exercise, did your reactive mind show up and try to draw your attention to a negative thought, emotion, or memory? Reactive mind is like Coyote in Native American mythology: stealthy and full of mischief and dark magic. When you repeat this exercise again and Coyote appears, softly thank your mind and return to the task at hand. Pay attention to how stories propel you in one emotional direction or another. Just as negative self-story elements tend to hang out together, positive elements do the same. So you might notice that one positive memory suddenly unearths another related one. If this happens, give yourself permission to bask in as many positive memories as come into awareness, strengthening those positive emotion–producing neural networks.
A Unique Brick Wall
This story, told by physicist-turned–Buddhist monk Ajahn Brahm, offers some insight on how to gain perspective on the bad elements of your life when thinking about the whole of your life. He left his promising academic career to live in a nearby forest with other monks in his sect. Without any prior training as a bricklayer, he assembled a simple monastery with brick walls. After it was completed, and before he shared the space with fellow monks, he inspected it one more time and found two bricks that were conspicuously laid in the wrong way. The more he examined the wall, the more he was mortified by his mistake. He decided he must tear down the blemished wall before anyone saw the obvious flaw.
The next day, without warning, another monk stopped by before Ajahn could begin demolishing the wall. He said nothing of his decision to the visiting monk, who casually walked around the entire monastery and then said, “Those two bricks that protrude so beautifully give this monastery a blessed feeling, and I want to thank you for sharing this inspiration with us all!” The monk bowed in gratitude to Ajahn.
In the guided audio exercise that follows, we will help you decide what to do with the misplaced bricks in your wall of life:
First, list any misplaced bricks that you think have ruined your wall of life. Next, mentally bring these bricks forward, one by one. You can even put inscriptions on them if you like, just so you know they are all here.
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Now focus your attention solely on those bricks. Try to make the rest of your wall of life disappear. Try really hard to create this image that there is no other wall at all. Your wall is completely defined by the misplaced bricks.
Now focus your attention on the whole of your life story, and make the misplaced bricks disappear. Try really hard to imagine that those misplaced bricks are not even part of your wall of life.
Now focus your attention on the whole of your brick wall of life and intentionally blend in the misplaced bricks, along with the properly placed ones. See if you can experience firsthand the beauty of this building you have constructed.
Further Exploration. What happened as you tried to change the “figure and ground” relationship between the intact parts of your life journey and the difficult setbacks or disappointments of your life? When you made the setbacks the defining feature of your journey, how did that feel inside? When you tried to make the intact parts of your journey the only story in town, what happened to the misplaced bricks? What happened when you included both the intact parts and the setbacks as core elements of your wall of life? The idea that even your flaws, setbacks, and disappointments are somehow an integral feature of your life journey is hard to grasp for most of us, but particularly so if you are harsh, self-critical, and perfectionistic. We are going to examine this fundamental reversal of perspective in much more detail in chapter 11, so read on!
The reactive mind is a natural-born storyteller; we each have hundreds of stories to tell.
Memory bias in depression results in positive information being filtered out, leading to an artificially negative tone in your self-story.
Your self-story contains select, highly filtered life themes and predictions about the future. It is not an accurate account of who you are.
Buying into a compelling but self-defeating story can have a devastating impact on your behavior in situations that matter to you.
Practiced over time, negative self-stories weaken neural circuitry in the brain responsible for producing rewarding emotions and positive motivation states.
Practicing positive self-stories strengthens neural circuitry in the brain responsible for producing rewarding emotions and positive motivation.
A “true” self-story is one that helps you succeed in specific life situations that matter to you. Thus, there are really a limitless number of true self-stories available for you to use.
If you step back from your self-story and see it as a story, you can escape its toxic effects and instead act in ways that promote vitality in your life.
