Stuck In a Story: How We’re Shaped by Our Narratives
The most unique job I ever had was researching on a true crime show called Psychic Detectives. Each episode followed the same format: police would get stumped mid-investigation and call in a psychic to help them figure it out.
It worked every time.
After weeks or months of chasing leads, knocking on doors, and chewing over clues, the detectives would zero in on a theory of what happened - and promptly get stuck. Trying to make all the puzzle pieces fit the picture they had in mind would lead them to misinterpret or just flat out miss the information that didn’t fit their theories - information that was often crucial to the case.
The psychics never “solved” the crimes - there were no smoking gun visions or red-handed palm readings. But what they did was still invaluable. They made it possible for the police to look beyond the boundaries of their theories to see what they had missed. They asked questions and gave insights that helped challenge investigators’ dead-end narratives and interpretations in order to see the full picture more clearly.
How We Create Stories About Ourselves
In a way, therapy is a lot like this.
We all carry stories about who we are and how the world works. Sometimes we inherit them. We're surrounded by messages from our families, cultures, and religions about who we're supposed to be, how we're supposed to live, what makes someone successful or worthy, and what a good life is supposed to look like.
Other times we come up with them on our own.
There’s a term that can help us understand this (and I want you to know I learned this from a Daft Punk podcast). Apophenia is our tendency to connect dots, see patterns, and make links between things that may or may not be related. It's what makes us see animals in the clouds, turn stars into constellations, and - for Daft Punk at least - hear the words “face to face” in a spliced up sample from a song about Winnie the Pooh.
And we don’t just connect dots in the world around us; we connect them in our own lives too. As psychiatrist Bruce Perry says, we’re “meaning making machines.” How we interpret and make sense of our day-to-day lives, world events, history, and everything in between shapes our understanding of how the world works, and who we are.
In other words, as Jordan Walker writes in A Violent Masterpiece, “the straight-line stories we tell ourselves about our lives are the same as when we look up at the clouds and see faces looking back.”
Problem-Saturated Stories: When Stories Become Restrictive
By making these connections we develop understandings and narratives about ourselves - our strengths and weaknesses, how we’re seen, how we’re valued, where we do or don't fit, etc.
These stories don’t just make sense of our lives, they shape how we live them. “The particular story that prevails or dominates in giving meaning to the events of our lives determines, to a large extent, the nature of our lived experience and our patterns of action,” say Michael White and David Epston, two of the founders of Narrative Therapy.
Over time, these dominant narratives can become taken for granted, making it easy to forget a crucial fact: they’re still stories.
“We have constructed many ways of looking at the world and ourselves, and we have become so used to such understandings that we have forgotten that they are constructions,” says White.
Sometimes these constructions work for us. Other times, they become restrictive - or what narrative therapists call Problem-Saturated Stories.
This happens when the problem we’re dealing with comes to define us. Suddenly, depression isn't just something we're experiencing; it becomes evidence of the kind of person we are. Anxiety becomes proof that we're incapable. A failed relationship confirms we're unlovable.
It goes on and on. And once we start living as though the story is true, our actions can create the very evidence we use to confirm it.
But here’s the key: dominant narratives are never the whole story. When we connect the dots of our experiences in a way that tells us we’re lazy, cruel, careless, or not good enough, we inevitably story out the moments that suggest otherwise. Once a narrative takes hold, we tend to notice the pieces that fit while overlooking the ones that don’t.
So stories of inadequacy make success feel like a fluke.
Stories of weakness make strength invisible.
Stories of inferiority make capability a footnote.
The problem isn't that these stories are necessarily false - they can be totally accurate. The problem is they're incomplete, and blind us to fuller, better stories.
How Therapy Can Help Us See a Different Story
There's a huge amount of hope in this. We may carry stories that say we are depressed, anxious, broken, stupid, unlovable, not enough, and so on, but these are still stories. They reflect real pain and real struggles, but the conclusions we draw from these experiences - about ourselves, about others, and about the world - should not be mistaken for gospel truth.
Recognizing this gives us a choice. We can keep living inside a story that limits us, or we can begin looking for what other narratives might be possible. We can start connecting different dots to make a different picture.
“In narrative work, it is very common to deconstruct these understandings,” White says. “Through such deconstructions, the doorways to new understandings and new options are revealed.”
This kind of therapy isn’t about denying, downplaying, or minimizing what you’re going through, but discovering what storied-out strengths, skills, capabilities and values exist just outside of frame that can help you better navigate those challenges.
It's about examining the stories that have become so familiar that they no longer feel like stories. It's about asking what has been left out, what doesn't quite fit, and what other possibilities might be hiding in plain sight. It's about digging up, and building on stories of hope, capacity, and opportunity instead of staying stuck in dead-end stories of brokenness, lack, and deficiency.
I’m not a psychic - I just researched them for TV. But sometimes therapy is about doing what the detectives couldn’t: stepping back from the stories we’ve told and been told, seeing what else might be there, and discovering what becomes possible when we do.
