I recently re-read a book I’ve read a couple of other times in my life. The first time in my mid-twenties, then again in my mid-thirties. It’s a novel about a father’s journey from bitterness and despair to acceptance and redemption after he suffered a horrible family tragedy. Each time I’ve read this emotion provoking book, it has produced different thoughts and feelings in me based on the state of my beliefs, convictions, and experiences up to that particular time in my life.
The storyline of the book has not changed. I have changed. My own personal story has evolved and changed. I have experienced more life, more joy, more sorrow. I have grown and become more self-aware about how information affects me. How I process that information and how I choose to respond to it. Therefore, what and how I relate to the story has changed.
The first time I read the book, I did not have any children. I was in my mid-twenties and I approached information from a very analytical place. I remember reading the book and questioning the accuracy of how God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit was represented. When I read the book the second time, I just had my first biological child, my baby girl. As I read the book, I remember feeling completely overwhelmed by the grief of the father over the loss of his baby girl. I wept uncontrollably and grieved alongside this fictional character. Most recently, I found myself focusing on the spiritual and emotional journey the whole family took from start to finish. I noticed details that I had not noticed before. I found myself pondering humanity and God’s awesome omnipotence.
Certainly, it’s a sign of a good book or a good movie when it can generate strong feelings and relate on a personal level to a large audience. As gifted as writers and movie producers are, each person that reads their book or watches their movie, in the end will give a narrative slightly or maybe even drastically different based on the unique perspective of that person.
When we read a book or watch a movie, we are often eager to share and compare our experience with others. Why? On one hand, we are intrigued when someone sees it differently than us. As we hear their rendition of the story, we are either fascinated or confused by their recollection, where they put the emphasis, what parts they left out, what they concluded.
As intrigued as we are to hear about the differences, we are perhaps even more invested in looking for others to validate our perspective or relate to the same parts of the story we connected too. It is a core desire of our human condition to relate and connect. Human connection is incredibly important to us. It’s our way of knowing that we were noticed and someone else relates to our experience.
When we tell our life story we apply the same method. We use to share the narrative of a book or a movie. We are intentional on some level of how we sequence the information we want to share, what we chose to include and omit, and we are deliberate about what parts we want to emphasize. We don’t tend to share the biography of our lives like Wikipedia shares facts and events. We tend to integrate those facts and events internally—pick them apart and weave them back together to make meaning.
This narrative becomes a form of our identity; in which the things we choose to include in the story, and the way we tell it, can both reflect and shape who we are. Our life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who we are, for who we may become, and for what happens next. The story itself becomes a part of who we are.
As we go about our daily lives. We are constantly thinking about and interpreting the situations we find ourselves in. We have almost instantaneous impressions and we search for validations and contradictions to our narratives. We category things as true or false, good or bad. It is this ability to reason, to categorize, to understand, to choose that makes human beings God’s amazing creation.
What we believe about anything is not a measure of its correctness. It is a measure of the way we subconsciously program ourselves to interpret the information and to support and/or make sense of our beliefs, feelings and experiences. Our internal dialogue about truth is highly subjective. The things that I believe to be absolute truth are not necessarily other people’s truth.
The many variables and events in our lives can drastically affect and even skew our lens and our inner voice If they go unchecked and unmanaged. If we are unaware of our process and tendencies, we can overreact or underreact to any situation. We end up responding instinctively versus out of the full capacity of our wise brain. When we condition our brain to certain response sequences we put our brian on autopilot. Experts in the field of psychology refer to this response process as conditioning. On autopilot our cognitive and emotional brains often don’t communicate and become unbalanced. When this happens we can find ourselves feeling frustrated, stuck, confused or even hurt with the world outside of us and also with ourselves. Our internal dialogue can begin to drift toward negative self-talk. We begin to expect the negative response therefore a negative causation. It can cause significant conflict in our lives and in our relationships.
We have to evaluate the status and health of our thoughts and feelings just as we evaluate and maintain our physical bodies. Part of the evaluation and maintenance process is to bring the two parts of our mind into what is known as our “wise mind”. Our “wise mind” helps us make sense of our “thinking mind” and “feelings mind” and helps us come up with balanced and wise responses. (Linehan 1993, DBT Therapy).
Let me share an example: Susan and David are going out of town for a weekend getaway. A driver in a vehicle ahead of David goes from the far left lane of the interstate across three lanes of traffic to get off the exit. Susan’s inner voice says, “thank goodness they made it” but David’s inner-voice says, “that idiot, he could have caused a huge pile up and killed someone.” Same experience, different responses.
Okay, let me give you some back story. David’s mother was killed in a traffic accident when David was a small boy, his father was driving. His experience has shaped his perspective, how he views and responds to events related to what he has identified as “dangerous driving”. His inner-voice tells him that he should “always” be vigilant, danger on the road is just around the corner. His inner voice is shaped by loss and fear. He has high expectations and is incredibly critical of other people’s driving as well as his own. His unconscious fear about losing his wife and being responsible for leaving his children without a mom is incomprehensible. Susan on the other hand, believes that she is a good driver; however she acknowledges that she is not a good navigator. When she is driving somewhere new, she often misses her turn or exit.
Her personal experiences have caused her a great deal of anxiety about getting lost. Her perspective and inner voice is shaped by her experience and feelings of compassion for others who also appear to struggle with navigating. She is always relieved when her husband drives (which is always when they are together) as she trusts him to get them to their destination. David in her experience, is an excellent driver and never gets lost. Susan is aware of David’s history, but she is not aware of his persistent negative self-talk each time he gets behind the wheel. David does not understand why Susan has compassion for “people that drive like idiots,” and he doesn’t ever want to have a conversation about it especially in the car. Once they get to their destination, they move on and nothing is ever discussed.
It’s incredibly important for both David and Susan to be aware of how their personal perspective and inner voice were formed and shaped. It appears that both David and Susan have allowed their inner voice to be on autopilot regarding this matter. If they do not spend time looking at why they have different responses, how it was formed and how it may shape their current view of the world and themself, it can and eventually will lead to a personal conflict for David or an interpersonal conflict between Susan and David. They are both responding out of their “emotional brain” caused by how their “cognitive brain” processed their previous experiences. If David does not address and tend to his negative self-talk, the pressure he puts on himself can cause him other issues like anxiety, irritability, rage, sleeplessness, high-blood pressure, etc. When we feel anxious, depressed or stressed-out our self-talk is likely to become extreme and irrational. We are more likely to expect the worst and focus on the most negative aspects of any situation. So, it’s helpful to try and put things into their proper perspective and find our wise brain. A healthy logical brain along with a healthy emotional brain allows us to operate in our wise brain.
Dr. Ben Martin in his article Challenging Self-Talk gives us four questions to test the accuracy of our perception and help us tune into our self-talk to stay healthy, balanced and aware. These questions will help us to check out our self-talk to see whether our current view is reasonable and balanced allowing us to operate in our wise brain. It will allow us to evaluate our story and the narrative we tell.
There are four main types of challenging questions to ask ourselves:
1. Reality testing
- What is my evidence for and against my thinking?
- Are my thoughts factual, or are they just my interpretations?
- Am I jumping to negative conclusions?
- How can I find out if my thoughts are actually true?
2. Look for alternative explanations
- Are there any other ways that I could look at this situation?
- What else could this mean?
- If I were being positive, how would I perceive this situation?
3. Putting it in perspective
- Is this situation as bad as I am making out to be?
- What is the worst thing that could happen? How likely is it?
- What is the best thing that could happen?
- What is most likely to happen?
- Is there anything good about this situation?
- Will this matter in five years time?
4. Using goal-directed thinking
- Is thinking this way helping me to feel good or to achieve my goals?
- What can I do that will help me solve the problem?
- Is there something I can learn from this situation, to help me do it better next time?
-Tundi