Telling Our Stories

 

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

Hmmm!  Still thinking about the desire to tell story.  This is what I came up with in my pondering.

We tell story and by that I mean we  relay the details of our experience in a selectively descriptive way in order to:

• personalize what is happening to us and around us so the egoic mind can make sense of it.  The ego is very narcisstic isn't it?  And it likes to analyse and  make sense of external events.  It does that by insisting there be a "me, my or mine" attached somehow.  So it personalizes everything.  Somehow the pyschosis or suffering of another is created to be something thas has to do with 'little me'.  (I mean in this case it did...because I was the supicious target and because it is happening in my houseold) but any detail we add to the story we tell others has to be "me" focused.  So we take things that have nothing to do with us personally...things maybe we have no business making our own...and we make them about us through story.  And I am not talking about a story of  empathy, compassion and metta kindness here. I mean...using  other experiences to create a melodramatic victim status. 
• to project away from true suffering and real emotions we would rather deny.  The better the drama we create, the better the story.  The better the story, the more in the head we focus.  The more in the head we are the less we have to focus on real feelings and experiences in the here and now.  I was feeling a mixture of things yesterday..."overwhelm" being one of these things. There was also fear, worry, concern, frustration, hoplelessness, resentment, guilt and shame.  It was uncomfortable to feel this way and my protective mind said, "Yucky!  Don't go there.  Story telling is much more fun." So Iwas really tempted  to create story around this experience.  
• release emotions.  Reflecting on our experiences and how they make us feel is a very healthy thing to do. For that reason writing and telling our story can have therapeutic effect.  It will allow us to understand how "we feel" and help us to release trapped or residual emotion  that accumulates in our dealing with the circumstances of our lives.  The thing is, we don't need an audience to release emotions...just writing the story in a letter or telling one trusted person would suffice.  Many of us, however, tend to go beyond telling one trusted person.  We want an audience taht will react. We do not write a letter to have it stuffed away in a drawer or burnt.  We seek an audience that will feed our egos and keep us from releasing these emotions. We really don't, then, tell the story just so we can release emotion...we do it so we can control emotion.  
• get  a reaction and validation.  We share our stories so that we are validated.  "Man this is is what is happening.  Don't you think it is alot tohave to deal with?  Don't you think I have a lot on my plate too?  Don't you believe you would find all this challenging if it were happening to you?"  We want the fact that we are finding it difficult to cope validated as normal, don't we?  Yet...too often we take it a step farther. We want  people to not only validate our challenge but to  oohh and awe over the magnitude of "problems" and "challenges"  we have in our lives.  To tell us that we are strong or that we are undeserving of such challenge.  We want, I guess, some "special" status reward for our suffering....that will come with such  reactions from others.  

Well that is what I came up with so far in my thinking about the need to tell story.  It really is quite interesting.

All is well in my world.