The Stories We Tell Ourselves…

I find myself thinking about more and more as both a therapist and simply as a human being trying to make sense of this life is how much power our stories have. Not the stories that actually happened, because those are fixed. We can’t go back and rewrite our childhoods, undo painful conversations, erase betrayals, or change the moments that shaped us. Those events become part of our history whether we like them or not. But what fascinates me is everything that happens after the event itself. It’s the meaning we attach to it, the conclusions we draw, and the quiet narrative that begins forming in the background of our minds without us ever consciously deciding to write it. Somewhere along the way, our brains stop remembering what happened and start telling us what it means about who we are.
I don’t think any of us realize we’re doing it.
In fact, I think that’s what makes it so powerful. We don’t wake up one morning and decide we’re going to believe we’re not enough or that we’ll never be loved or that people always leave. Those aren’t conscious decisions. They develop over years of collecting experiences, disappointments, losses, failures, criticisms, and heartbreaks until eventually our minds begin connecting dots that may or may not belong together. A child who repeatedly feels unseen doesn’t simply remember feeling lonely. They often grow into an adult who quietly believes they aren’t important. Someone who experiences enough rejection may stop seeing individual disappointments and instead begin believing rejection is simply who they are. Over time those beliefs become so familiar that they stop feeling like beliefs altogether. They begin to feel like facts.
I see this happen almost every day in my therapy office, but if I’m being honest, I’ve watched it happen in my own life too. (It’s a current struggle)…There have been many seasons where I am convinced my worth depends entirely on what I can accomplish. If I’m productive, I feel valuable. Other moments it’s about if I helped enough people, achieved enough goals, worked enough hours, or kept enough plates spinning, then maybe I had earned my place in the world. I cant’t tell you when that story began because stories like these rarely announce themselves. They quietly take shape over years until one day you realize you’ve been living according to rules you never intentionally chose.
That’s what our minds are designed to do. They’re constantly searching for patterns because patterns help us make sense of uncertainty. It’s actually a remarkable survival mechanism. If something painful happens, our brains naturally want to answer the question, “Why?” The problem is that when we don’t have an answer, we often create one. Sometimes that answer is accurate. Other times it’s filtered through fear, shame, insecurity, or the limited understanding we had at the time. A child doesn’t have the ability to say, “My parents were emotionally unavailable because they were carrying wounds of their own.” A child is much more likely to conclude, “There must be something wrong with me.” The event may have lasted a moment, but the story can last decades.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that many of us are not living inside our circumstances nearly as much as we’re living inside the stories we’ve built around those circumstances. Two people can experience remarkably similar lives and come away believing completely different things about themselves. One person loses a relationship and concludes they weren’t compatible. Another loses a relationship and spends the next twenty years believing they’re impossible to love. One person makes a mistake and sees it as part of being human. Another makes the same mistake and quietly adds another piece of evidence to a lifelong story that says they’ll never be good enough. The event is the same. The story changes everything.
That’s why I think healing has less to do with forgetting the past than it does with becoming curious about the stories we’ve accepted as truth. Curiosity is a powerful thing because it interrupts certainty. It creates space between us and the beliefs we’ve carried for years. Instead of immediately accepting the familiar narrative, we begin asking different questions. Is this actually true? Is this the only explanation? Would I say this to someone I love? Is this belief coming from who I am today, or is it being narrated by a younger version of me who was simply trying to survive? Those questions don’t erase what happened, but they often loosen the grip that old stories have on our lives.
I wonder how many of us are still living according to stories that were written by frightened children, grieving teenagers, exhausted parents, or hurting partners. I wonder how many decisions we make every day are based on conclusions that once protected us but no longer serve us. More importantly, I wonder what would happen if we gave ourselves permission to pick up the pen again—not to erase the chapters we’ve already lived, because those chapters matter, but to recognize that the story isn’t over simply because we’ve been telling ourselves the same version of it for years.
Maybe that’s one of the most hopeful things about being human. We don’t get to choose every chapter that life hands us, but we do have a voice in how the story continues. And sometimes the first step toward healing isn’t changing our life at all. Sometimes it’s simply recognizing that the narrator in our head isn’t always telling the whole story.