Free Yourself From Your Narrative

Recently, I watched a Ted Talk given by Lori Gottlieb who talked about how to achieve a more satisfying life via changing the viewpoints of our own stories [2]. Lori is a psychologist who also runs an advice column called “Dear Therapist” where people share their painful and tough stories and seek advice [3]. Lori notices that she had to be very careful when responding to the letters, because each letter is actually “a story written by a specific author” which means, other version(s) exist as well and a completely opposite version could exist, too. Lori points out that we human are actually all unreliable narrators when describing our own stories. 

In social psychology, the Attribution Theory describes how people explain certain results and consequences [1]. Interestingly, when good things happen, we often claim it to ourselves (internal reasons), such as our efforts and our awesome personalities. Yet, as for negative results, we seek external reasons, including unluckiness, “it's other’s faults”, weather, even.  

When we have an understanding of what Attribution Theory means, it is easy to understand Lori’s concerns about how to comment on each letter and why we could be biased narrators. The point here is not to make us feel shameful for it and force ourselves to become unbiased because I believe that being a biased narrator is actually part of our human nature. But I think the important take-home point is that we realise we could be biased, so how we can change our future behaviours, and act now to escape from the negative impacts of this biased viewpoint. 

If we keep blaming others for negative consequences, we cannot make any changes and walk out of it. Like Lori said, we would easily trust the version of stories we tell and would be invested in our stuckness. These misleading stories can truly mess us up and stop us from finding ways to solve them. For example, someone may describe his or her failed job interview as “I can tell the examiner doesn’t like me from the beginning and only ask me tricky questions”; “I was the last one to have the interview that day so both the interviewer and I was tired” or even “the weather was so bad which impacted my mood so much so I cannot concentrate”. If this is the only explanation of his/her failure experience, what can this person do to improve his/herself? There is, unfortunately, no way out because of one thing for sure, we cannot negotiate with the weather. 

Then what could we do? I think even though we cannot change the human nature set-up, which is the way we think, we can add elements to our stories. Using the example earlier, if a person does believe that the examiner doesn’t like him/her, he could try to think “how can I communicate well with a person who doesn’t like me?”. Although it could be an external factor, we still can solve it by drawing it back to our inner factors, and making the situation more controllable under our own hands. 

I think except in working conditions, we sometimes easily describe us as a victim in scenarios related to relationships. We could become very sensitive in love. When some unhappy things happen or we cannot get our satisfied love back in a relationship, we would blame our partners for what happened. Let’s make up a story which could be very common “a couple A and B had an argument about who should wash dishes this morning”. Then in A’s story, it could be like “B does not love me anymore, because he used to wash dishes when I felt unwell. I think he might have an affair”, while in B’s mind it could be like “I didn’t wash the dishes because I was almost late for work this morning. However, A’s temper becomes so unpredictable recently and it seems like everything I do seem to irritate her. She just cannot show even a little bit of understanding to me at all”. I believe this kind of scenarios is very common in daily life. However, if we keep thinking everything it's our partner's faults, we will regard ourselves as the world's utmost misfortunate in the world. 

It is important that we can get out of the first-person narration and redescribe this story from our partner’s side [1]. If we want to understand our partner’s side, try to have more communication and connection between each other could be the best way. If A can know that B is almost late for work this morning and B understand that A was feeling unwell, then each character and action becomes sympathetic and understandable, moreover, none of them will question each other’s love. 

Source from Lori Gottlieb's Ted Talk [2].

I really love the cartoon scenario Lori used in her speech: a prisoner keeps shaking the bars and wants to get out. However, if he looks to the right and left, it is actually open for him to walk out. As Lori said, this is often us who feel trapped but are not: We want to change and free ourselves when actually, we simply would not look at ourselves but want others to change for us. Therefore, be more open-minded to yourself and as well as the external world. You would have your own version of what happened and there could be bars in front of you, but look wider, then you can find the exit is so close to you and you could pick up lots of different elements to colour your stories.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.”

Wholeheartedly,

The Lights Within

Sources:

[1] McLeod, S. (2012). Attribution Theory. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/attribution-theory.html

[2] Gottlieb, L. (2019). How changing your story can change your life. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/lori_gottlieb_how_changing_your_story_can_change_your_life/transcript#t-846914

Related resources:

[3] “Dear Therapist”, Advice column by Lori Gottliebs & Rebecca Rosen, https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/dear-therapist/