The Stories we Tell Ourselves
As we all agree, we are humans and we live for stories. The best way someone can sell us something is to create a story around their subject. We love our fairy tales, adult tales like Marvel comics and Marvel Universe stories. We learn about Greek mythological figures through these stories. Fiction is a great way to expand our imagination and creativity. Non fiction however seems boring and dry next to our fictional stories.
Did you ever ponder over the stories your family told you about ancestors, about your heritage, your ethnicity, your race?
How about the stories religions tell the believers?
From the moment we are born we start to gather sensory information about the world around us and we start interpreting them into stories. We start internalizing these stories that we deem true. Mom is always there when I cry, she finds out what upset me. Dad takes me for a ride or I can sleep on his chest. The Dodo we have is playful and funny and I can pull his fur without him getting upset.
As we grow we start to experiment what we like and don’t like, how we react and what works or not to get the results we want. We unconsciously start to label situations, people and things as good and bad, fun or sad, comforting or depressing. We develop a conviction about it. If dad is a drunken, that is how we see dad’s role in our story. If mom is neglecting me and I am often left alone, that will become my reality, a part of my story.
Or the opposite. Mom is attentive and dad always listens, so this is what I expect in life. When we encounter a new situation, we start guessing how we could react or how it would affect us depending our past experiences, the way we tell our stories to ourselves.
NOTE: We are locked into our body, our brain reacts to sensory input the way it was conditioned by past experiences. We will never be totally objective because we are determined by our past and our stories we have told ourselves.
(example of resources: Psychologist Dan McAdams, Historian Yuval Noah Harari)