Diane, whose partner had recently broken off their engagement, immediately blamed herself for being “unlovable,” even though she, too, harbored serious doubts about the future of the relationship. But instead of pausing and investigating the source of her story of unlovability with mindfulness and self-compassion, Diane leaped to a negative conclusion carried over from childhood.
If we heard a friend say, “I’m not worth much. I’m not interesting, I’ve failed at so much, and that’s why no one loves me,” we would probably leap to her defense. “But I love you,” we’d insist. “Your other friends love you, too. You’re a good person.” Yet so often we don’t counter the negative statements that crowd our own minds every day.
Instead, we might ask ourselves: If I look at what’s happening through the eyes of love, how would I tell this story?
TAPPING INTO BURIED NARRATIVES
OUR SENSES ARE often the gateway to our stories, triggering memories from long ago. We catch a whiff of fresh blueberry muffins, which reminds us of our childhood—the blueberries growing wild in our garden when the family had a beach house. And then we’re gone: we smell the sea, taste the clams we ate sitting on high stools at the boardwalk, and are transported back to that horrible night when Dad got drunk. The sharp memory of that night might bring up the sad thought that Dad probably never really loved us, followed by a leap into the present: Maybe I’m spoiled for love. Maybe I’ll never be loved.
This process is largely unconscious. The unconscious mind is a vast repository of experiences and associations that sorts things out much faster than the slow-moving conscious mind, which has to work hard to connect the dots. Moreover, the unconscious mind operates with some very powerful biases, and tends to underscore our pain.
In some cases, the limiting stories we have woven about ourselves don’t even belong to us. Unconsciously, we may be reliving our mother’s anxiety, our father’s disappointments, or the unresolved traumas suffered by our grandparents. “Just as we inherit our eye color and blood type, we may also inherit the residue of traumatic events that have taken place in our family,” explains therapist Mark Wolynn, author of It Didn’t Start with You. Wolynn tells the story of a client who suddenly became paralyzed with the fear of being “suffocated” when she turned forty. It was only when she investigated her family history that she discovered that a grandmother whom she’d been told had “died young” of vague causes had actually been put to death in the gas chamber at Auschwitz when she was forty years old.
The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking. Research in the rapidly developing field of epigenetics—the biological science of alterations in gene expression—shows that traits can be transmitted from one generation to as many as three generations of descendants. For example, a landmark study in Sweden found that a grandparent’s experience of either famine or plenty had implications for the life span of the next generation—and the one after that. Another study, this one conducted by Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, found that offspring of Holocaust survivors were three times more likely to respond to a traumatic event with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than children whose parents did not survive the Holocaust. What’s more, Yehuda and her team found that the children of pregnant women who were near the World Trade Center when the buildings came down were also more prone to PTSD.
If you think you may be unconsciously living out someone else’s story, Wolynn suggests asking yourself—or family members—some key questions. These include: Who died early? Who left? Who was abandoned or excluded from the family? Who died in childbirth? Who committed suicide? Who experienced a significant trauma?
Whether the stories we tell ourselves arise directly from our own life experiences or were unconsciously inherited from previous generations, identifying the source of our personal narratives helps us to release its negative aspects and reframe it in ways that promote wholeness.
REWRITING OUR STORY
AS WE CONSTRUCT our identities, we tend to reinforce certain interpretations of our experiences, such as, “No one was there for me, so I must be unlovable.” These interpretations become ingrained in our minds and validated by the heated reactions of our bodies. And so they begin to define us. We forget that we’re constantly changing and that we have the power to make and remake the story of who we are. But when we do remember, the results can be dramatic and turn our lives around.
For years, Stephanie struggled with insomnia. When she was in her early thirties, her doctor prescribed a blood-pressure-lowering medication for her persistent migraines. The trouble was, Stephanie already had low blood pressure, and the drug made it drop even further, making her so anxious that she felt as if she would die if she let herself fall asleep. Instead of identifying the real source of the problem, her physician prescribed sleeping pills. By the time Stephanie consulted another doctor (who discontinued the blood pressure medication immediately), she was hooked on sleeping pills—and remained addicted to them for the next twenty years.
“I hated myself for taking them and tried so many times to stop, but I just couldn’t,” she recalls. “I truly believed that there was something inherently wrong with me and that my body no longer had the capacity to sleep without chemicals. The nights I tried not to take the pills, I’d lie awake for hours, panicking, drenched in sweat, until I finally just gave up and reached for the drug.”
But two years ago, when Stephanie started reading news stories about the dangers of sleeping pills, she became determined to stop taking them. She began meditating more regularly and tried every imaginable herbal remedy; still, she struggled and relapsed off and on for months. It wasn’t until she identified—and questioned—the story she’d been telling herself about how she couldn’t sleep unaided by drugs that she successfully weaned herself off them. “When I finally saw clearly that I’d been held captive by this story that was just a story and not the truth, it was as if a lightbulb went on. For the first time in twenty years, I was able to trust my ability to let go and fall asleep on my own,” she says.
Ultimately, we’re the only ones who can take a familiar story, one that is encoded in our bodies and minds, and turn it around.
Nancy Napier, a trauma therapist, talks about working with people who have been through what she calls “shock trauma,” a huge life disruption—from dangerous situations, like a terrible car accident or plane crash, to more everyday events, like getting laid off or a break up in a relationship that are perceived as huge. The key piece, Napier tells me, is that people’s ordinary lives have been destabilized, and their expectations feel like they have been ripped apart. One of the first things she often says to her clients who have experienced trauma is You survived. “You’d be amazed at how many people for whom that is a real surprise,” she explains. “It’s a news flash to the nervous system and psyche.”
If I were choosing captions for snapshots of my early life, they would look like this: “Motherless child,” “Abandoned,” “My mentally ill father,” “Raised by first-generation immigrants,” “I don’t know how to be like everyone else.” Pain, upheaval, and fear brought me to seek a new story through meditation.
One of my meditation teachers was an extraordinary Indian woman named Dipa Ma. She became my role model of someone who endured crushing loss and came through it with enormous love. Her whole path of meditation was propelled by loss—first, the deaths of two of her children, then the sudden death of her beloved husband. She was so grief-stricken that she just gave up and went to bed, even though she still had a daughter to raise.
One day her doctor told her, “You’re going to die unless you do something about your mental state. You should learn how to meditate.” The story is told that when she first went to practice meditation, she was so weak that she had to crawl up the temple stairs in order to get inside.
Eventually, Dipa Ma emerged from her grief with enormous wisdom and compassion, and in
1972, she became one of my central teachers.
One day in 1974, I went to say good-bye to her before leaving India for a brief trip to the United States. I was convinced I’d soon return and spend the rest of my life in India. She took my hand and said, “Well, when you go to America, you’ll be teaching meditation.”
“No, I won’t,” I replied. “I’m coming right back.”
She said, “Yes, you will.”
And I said, “No, I won’t. I can’t do that.”
We went on this way, back and forth.
Finally, she held my gaze and said two crucial things. First, she said, “You really understand suffering, that’s why you should teach.” This remark was an essential catalyst that enabled me to reframe my story: The years of upheaval and loss were not just something I had to get over but a potential source of wisdom and compassion that could be used to help me help others. My suffering might even be some kind of credential!
The second thing Dipa Ma said was this: “You can do anything you want to do. It’s your thinking that you can’t do it that’s stopping you.” What a different slant on my usual story of incapacity, incompleteness, and not being enough! I carried Dipa Ma’s farewell message with me back to the States. It set the course for the rest of my life.
To say I am grateful for the things I went through in childhood is a bridge too far for me. But I know those experiences are what allow me to connect to people, heart to heart.
In a similar spirit, Zen teacher Roshi Joan Halifax cautions against trying to convince ourselves to regard childhood traumas as gifts. In a recent talk, she suggested, “Think of them as givens, not gifts.” That way there’s no pretense or pressure to reimagine painful experiences. If something is a given, we don’t deny it or look the other way. We start by acknowledging it, then see how we can have absolutely the best life possible going forward.
TO TRULY LOVE OURSELVES
TO TRULY LOVE ourselves, we must treat our stories with respect, but not allow them to have a stranglehold on us, so that we free our mutable present and beckoning future from the past.
To truly love ourselves, we must open to our wholeness, rather than clinging to the slivers of ourselves represented by old stories. Living in a story of a limited self—to any degree—is not love.
To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or inherently better in order to be worthy of love. When we contort ourselves, doggedly trying to find some way to become okay, our capacity to love shrinks, and our attempts to improve ourselves fill the space that could be filled with love.
Maybe we don’t need to correct some terrible deficiency. Maybe what we really need is to change our relationship to what is, to see who we are with the strength of a generous spirit and a wise heart. St. Augustine said, “If you are looking for something that is everywhere, you don’t need travel to get there; you need love.”
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THE STORIES OTHERS TELL ABOUT US
Ultimately … it’s not the stories that determine our choices,
but the stories that we continue to choose.
—SYLVIA BOORSTEIN
JUST AS THE STORIES WE tell ourselves shape our experiences, so do the stories others tell about us. They can come with either a positive or a negative spin, undermine us or support us. And sometimes they aren’t even stories at all, but ideas conveyed by nonverbal signals, such as body language or facial expressions, or even by a single word or phrase: shy, withholding, generous, self-absorbed. It’s a gift when these stories lift us up. They remind us that we matter, and they reinforce real love for ourselves.
For Melody, the reminder came from a security guard at her high school. Melody had been fighting with her mother, who was on her back because her grades had been falling, and when Melody ended some old friendships to join a rougher crowd, it created even more friction between them. The security guard noticed Melody with her new friends while patrolling the edge of campus where they hung out. One day Melody was walking back to class when he quickened his steps to catch up with her. “Mija,” he said, “don’t you know you’re better than that?”
This was pretty much what her mother had been trying to tell her, but her cutting, accusatory tone caused her message to fall into the widening chasm between them. But the security guard’s voice was caring, and his words stayed with Melody all that day. Did she want to argue with the idea that she was better? No. In fact, before the guard spoke up, she’d been feeling that no one really saw her—how good she was and how hard she was trying—so why bother anymore? When the security guard showed her that people did see and expect good things from her, she was lifted up. Not long after, Melody pulled away from the rough crowd.
There are so many different ways we can interpret our experiences, based on the cues we internalize from others. Gus was the middle of five brothers and, almost from birth, seemed to have been born in the wrong place. His Montana family loved the outdoors, camping, hunting, and fishing. Gus loved reading and music and hated hiking and roughhousing. As the boys grew older, Gus was the odd kid out, and he could have had a very lonely childhood. But his uncle Don saw him clearly and admired the boy’s sensitivity. If he heard someone put Gus down, Uncle Don would intervene: “Don’t be so hard on Gus. Gus has a gift.” The family came to view Gus as someone unique who should be celebrated for his difference, and Gus grew up seeing himself that way, too.
When our loved ones mirror our goodness and strengths, and their stories cast us in a positive light, we naturally feel more love for ourselves.
THE WEB OF FAMILY
FAMILIES OFTEN ASSIGN us roles that shape our stories. We may not even remember how we acquired these labels or recall if we chose them for ourselves. And if you have had one bestowed on you, you know that even positive labels can become confining. Someone who has always been “the responsible one” can find herself in deep internal conflict when, on a particular occasion, she doesn’t feel like being so responsible. Or “the funny one” who’s having a bad day may feel he’s letting humanity down because he’s not up to fulfilling his role.
My friend Billie talks about the narrative she absorbed as she was growing up: “What is wrong with you?” her father often asked. Although Billie’s home provided the opportunity for “a lot of wonderful disclosure,” she describes it as a place where “a lot of bullying banter took place, as well.” As a result, Billie developed her own brand of self-ridicule. She now refers to her dad’s characteristic question (“What’s wrong with you?”) as her “first heartbreak, followed by deeper blows and losses” throughout her teens and young adulthood.
After internalizing this negative self-image, Billie resorted to substance abuse to relieve her pain. It was only after many years that she joined a recovery program where she found a new community—one that told a very different story about her. “One fortunate day, in my thirty-second year on earth, providence blew a blessing all the way across the universe, and it landed squarely on me,” she recalls. “I fell in with some people who had found a better way to live; a community of recovering addicts who had experiences that reflected my own. The value of them sitting with me, day after day, was without parallel. They reached out, reached in, and helped me heal. They paid quiet, dedicated attention to me, and that taught me to pay the same kind of attention to myself.”
In the group, Billie was a person with innate value, someone who could help others. She found that this new story helped strengthen her growing appreciation for herself. As with any new habit, adopting a revised view of oneself can be difficult and takes practice. But by committing to the group and the day in, day out work of recovery, Billie says, “I learned tenderness toward myself and was able to reach out tenderly to others who were suffering. I have been able to find contentment and gratitude in many things and for many years now.”
Sometimes the story a family member tells about us reflects only a single aspect of our character, yet unconsciously, we embrace it as the whole truth. Kathy’s moth
er started calling her a “tough old broad” when she was a teenager. It was true that the circumstances of their life together had been tough and that Kathy had responded with grit and discipline beyond her years. But the label always felt like an insult to Kathy—a limitation, not a compliment. How could she allow herself to be vulnerable or tender? How could she love herself? Who would want to love a “tough old broad”?
Yet there was another, equally true story that I could tell about Kathy’s vulnerability and empathy. A single oft-repeated phrase (“tough old broad”) had led Kathy to define herself with—or defend herself against—a very limited set of characteristics. Her identity had solidified around that story, even though the world did not always call on her to be tough—and even though she in fact did not respond to all situations with toughness.
At one time in Kathy’s life, being a young “tough old broad” had been a brilliant adaptive mechanism, but it wasn’t a healthy way for her to see herself forever. That’s why we must repeatedly test the limits of our story, to prevent it from becoming solid, to create some give, some stretch, some room for revision. When our narrative is flexible, each and every moment offers a fresh opportunity to welcome all aspects of our being. Kathy came to appreciate that she had been tough when necessary—and she could be tough again if it was required—but that toughness was not the whole of her.
THE JUDGMENT OF FRIENDS
BEN TELLS THE story of a second-grade playdate that shattered his confidence and changed his narrative about his family. “At recess, I was friendly with a kid named Justin, so my mother suggested inviting him over one day after school,” Ben recounts. “I didn’t know much about his family background—when you’re seven, you don’t really pay attention to such things. But it turned out that Justin came from a very wealthy family and lived in a big house in a fancy neighborhood. The day he came over, he just stood outside our modest rented brick duplex and said, with a look of horror on his face, ‘Ugh, this is where you live?’
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