You Are Trapped in a Story (My Most Controversial Opinion)

What is a story? In this week's audioessay we discuss the role of stories in our psychology, how mental narratives can keep us stuck and how we can start to develop more ownership over the stories of our lives. In particular we discuss ideas like transference, cognitive distortions & the life script to illustrate this further.

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant General Adult Psychiatrist who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

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Transcript

 Welcome back to the Thinking Mind podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. Today we're going to be talking about mental narratives, why we have them, how they keep us stuck, and how you can work on them. 12s I'm often asked what my most controversial opinion is, and I don't know if it's actually that controversial, but my answer is usually something like people are trapped in a story. So I apologize for the somewhat clickbaity title, but this is something I actually believe to be true. And if this is true, then of course it has all sorts of implications. Because it would affect everything about how we perceive and engage with reality and all the different events that happened to us. 1s There are many ways psychology has pointed this out to us, and we'll go into that in this podcast. But first, of course, we have to explain what is a story. A story is a distillation of events and experiences into a distinct plot or narrative, involving a few different people or characters. What most people don't understand about stories is that to convey a series of events as a story requires a very careful filtering of information. When you come home and start telling your husband or wife about your day, you're usually leaving out an enormous amount of information. Information which is boring, irrelevant, inconsequential. What you're doing when you're telling a story is you're picking, choosing, possibly embellishing the most important pieces of information to create a narrative that is compelling precisely because it contains what's useful, what's relevant, what's fascinating or unexpected. For example, a bad storyteller would say, I woke up, I brushed my teeth, I made coffee, I got dressed, I drove to work, I did some paperwork. I spoke to my boss, who was mad at me because he thought I made a mistake that Andrew actually made, but when he found out it was Andrew, he apologized. A good storyteller would say, I had the craziest day at work. My boss was furious with me because he thought I made a huge mistake with our biggest account. I was stressed out all day and I was sure I was about to be fired. Anyway, after a day of waiting, my boss calls me into his office and I was terrified. He sits me down, pats me on the back and told me he realized Andrew made the mistake on the account and that he was going on probation, and I didn't have to worry about anything. I was so relieved. As you can see, the first story had a huge amount of irrelevant information and when it came to the most important parts, just delivered in a dry, unemotional way with no sense of what the person was thinking or feeling. In the second story, there was only the information which was relevant, and the story turned on the emotions and motivations of all the people involved. There was a build up of tension, with the expectation of tragedy only for the tension to dissipate thanks to a last minute reprieve. 1s Now in our culture, media, we have stories to entertain ourselves, to convey important information like the news, and to express our artistic creativity. But we don't just tell each other stories. We tell ourselves stories most of our awaking lives and even whilst asleep, we tell ourselves stories in dream form. If this is not already obvious to you, just spend a minute examining your own thoughts. They may be something like tomorrow's meeting is going to be a tough one, or it's not about what he said, it's the way he said it that made me so upset or it's so sad. Things ended up quite in that way. We're constantly filtering the reality around us into a story and then telling ourselves that story over and over again. This highlights the difference between sensation and perception. Sensation is the initial process of detecting information from the external world, getting that raw data through our sensory organs like our eyes, ears, skin, nose, etcetera. Perception, on the other hand, is the process by which the brain organizes and interprets that data and gives it meaning and context. As we discussed in last week's essay, Your brain is a prediction. Machine perception involves the integration of the data with our knowledge, our memories, our expectations to construct a coherent map of the world. That's why in our media, in cultural and political discussions, we often talk about optics and public perception. It's a subtle acknowledgement of the fact that what has actually happened can be spun or packaged in different ways, in order to change an individual's interpretation of events. 1s Fragments of stories are constantly circulating in our psyche, and these fragments add up to a larger story we ultimately tell ourselves about the course of our lives. That being the case, the quality of our lives can only be as good as the quality of the stories we tell ourselves, which depends hugely on how we filter the reality around us to create that story. Now let's go into the different ways that psychology tells us our story. Making mechanisms can become distorted. Before we continue. Just a quick way to say that if you liked the podcast, there are a few ways you can support it. You can share it with a friend. You can give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can subscribe on any of those platforms or if you want to support us further, do check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. 1s So what are some of the ways that our storytelling mechanisms can become distorted? Today I'd like to look at three concepts transference, cognitive distortions, and the live script. Firstly, let's look at transference. Considering this is a psychology podcast, we don't talk about transference nearly enough. Transference refers to the unconscious and automatic process by which a person's feelings, attitudes, or expectations about one person are transferred onto another person, often based on similarities between the two individuals. Freud introduced the concept of transference as a fundamental aspect of his kind of therapy, psychoanalysis. He observed that patients often projected unresolved emotions, unresolved conflicts or experiences from their past onto their therapists. But of course, transference isn't just thought to happen in therapy. But transference is happening all the time in our daily lives. It should be said that everyone experiences transference to one degree or another, including therapists. When therapists are experiencing transference with their clients, this is called counter transference. Although everyone experiences transference, not everyone experiences it with the same intensity. We said earlier that transference is a projection of people's unresolved conflicts onto others. It follows logically, then, that the more unresolved conflicts you have, the more there is to project, and the more you see the world through a transference lens. The more transference is acting as your storytelling machine. And insofar as you are unaware of this, you would be trapped within the confines of that story. That's why, for example, people who have had tough authoritarian fathers may later have problems with authority figures and may overreact to displays of authority by, say, their boss or a teacher or a policeman. Similarly, people who have experienced childhood abandonment may feel the threat of abandonment looming large like a shadow over their relationships all the time, especially their romantic relationships, and they may overreact to any sign or signal from their partner that they require more space or distance, and they may overreact even to more trivial events, like taking long to answer a text or showing up late, or not returning a phone call. One of the goals of therapy, particularly psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, but really for most therapists on some level, is to begin to make a client aware of their transference and how this is influencing the way they see others, how it can influence their behavior, which can hopefully put them in a position to pierce through the veil of transference and see situations and people in their present lives from a fresh perspective. So, referring back to our examples, the person with problems with authority can begin to interact with authority figures, as individual people can learn to discern when it's appropriate to submit to authority, or when it's more appropriate to push back. The person can even lend. That authority can be beneficial. For example, if someone is an expert in their field and you need their advice. The person with a fear of abandonment can learn that they are prone to experiencing a huge surge of emotion when they feel their partner wants a little more space in their relationship, but that wanting space in a relationship is normal. It's not a sure sign they're going to be left. They can hopefully learn to metabolize these hard emotions, both on their own or with the help of their partner. And if they work on this enough, they can not only come to tolerate the space their partner wants, but even enjoy time alone and cultivate more agency and more independence. Secondly, let's look at cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions refer to patterns of thinking that have become irrational or biased, like transference. Everyone experiences these to some degree. Cognitive distortions are harmful because they cloud our view of reality. They lead to self-defeating behavior or self-sabotage, and they can cause people a lot of distress. Now you might think if cognitive distortions are so unhelpful, why do we even have them? There are many reasons posited in psychology as to why we might have them. These include evolutionary reasons that these distortions, although inaccurate, can help keep us alive. Anxiety is a good example of this. Others think they are cognitive shortcuts. They help us make decisions quickly without using a lot of mental energy, and still others think they help protect us from distressing emotions. And of course, it goes without saying that early life experience, family culture and societal conditioning will also play a role. What are a few examples of cognitive distortions? First, black and white thinking. Black and white thinking is one of our most frequent distortions. It forces complex situations into a binary all or nothing equation. A good example of black and white thinking might be am either going to find the man of my dreams, or I'm going to die unhappy and alone. Melodramatic as this might sound, this is quite a common kind of thought for people to have and notice, aside from how it oversimplifies the person's predicament, just how laden it is with drama, narrative, emotion, and imagery. Notice how story like it is, but also see how a statement like that robs a person of their agency, their resilience, their ability to adapt. Another example of a cognitive distortion is emotional reasoning. An example of emotional reasoning might be you need to give a presentation at work, and even though you've prepared really well, you feel really anxious about it. And this anxiety is accompanied by all sorts of thoughts and images in your mind about the presentation going badly and affecting your reputation at work. The reason emotionally is to think that these feelings are an accurate representation of reality, and to drop out of the presentation. As a result. Emotional reasoning can be particularly problematic in relationships because in relationships we often feel really difficult and complex emotions which the other person didn't intend for us to feel. In close relationships, people can hurt us without knowing, and if we reason emotionally, we think I feel hurt. Therefore, the other person has hurt me and this makes them a bad person. And the last cognitive distortions I'd like to mention are magnifications and disqualifications. This is a function of our selective attention. I think selective attention is so important that it will get its own podcast at some point. In any case, this is the idea that we magnify certain aspects of situations and disqualify others based on our psychology. If you're highly perfectionistic, you tend to magnify negative aspects of your performance and disqualify positive aspects of your performance. We see this in highly critical parents who might focus on their child's failings and ignore all of their achievements. If you are narcissistic, you may, at least in public, tend to magnify your positive attributes and ignore your negative ones. And if you're in the midst of a manic episode, you might see nothing but optimistic possibilities and be totally blind to dangers and pitfalls and cautions. Of course, the ideal we should be striving towards is to perceive a healthy balance of positive and negative factors, both within ourselves and our external environments. And the last concept I'd like to introduce today is the life script. The life script is an idea from transactional Analysis, or we previously referred to in our audio essay about the drama triangle. Essentially, the life script represents how a person's unconscious beliefs, decisions, and expectations shape the story of their lives. This includes the little stories we go through every day and the larger stories which develop over years and decades. Erik Man, who founded to posited that life scripts are developed during early childhood and are influenced by a person's upbringing, experiences, and family dynamics, and that these early messages can take many forms. For instance, they can be nurturing or supportive, or they can be negative or critical, and that this early life environment greatly impacts a person's self-concept, their worldview, and ultimately their script. Ben felt that someone's script would then go on to shape their behaviors and choices, and how they interact with people as an adult in the present. This is where things become quite fatalistic, in that if we never make conscious or examine our scripts, we're doomed to recreate the same patterns over and over again. Let's look at an example. Jane is a 35 year old woman who sought therapy for relationship difficulties and low self-esteem. She grew up in a family where her parents constantly compared her to her older sister, who was academically successful and socially popular. 1s Jane often felt she could never measure up to her sister's achievements, and she was frequently criticized for her perceived shortcomings. When examined in therapy, her and her therapists uncovered that she formed several beliefs early in her life based on these dynamics and experiences. Some of these beliefs included I am not good enough. I'll always be overshadowed by others. I have to try hard to gain approval from others. These beliefs came to be the major themes of her scripts. As Jane goes through life, these ideas are reinforced through repetition. Jane's scripts led her to unconsciously recreate these patterns of comparison and inadequacy in her adult relationships. She often found herself in friendships with people who made her feel less than. She frequently chose romantic partners who were critical or demanding, mirroring the way her parents treated her. These relationships often ended with Jane feeling unfulfilled and undervalued. You can see how Jane would end up with low self-esteem. Although it was rooted in her early life, hello self-worth then instilled a pattern of beliefs and behaviors which led to many relationships which had the outcome of reinforcing the original theme that she is not good enough. This is the story of her life, which was unfortunately bestowed early on, and which she has been living out ever since. The good news is that whether you think about things in terms of transference, cognitive distortions or your overall life script, you don't have to be doomed to play out these patterns unconsciously forever. But rather, once you can become aware of them, you can put yourself in a position to change them. And this is how you can become the author of your own life. This is why two crucial pillars of self-development are a to have some kind of introspective practice, a means by which you can learn about yourself and all the things that are outside of your immediate awareness, and be to give yourself the permission to act in novel and experimental ways. Be it in your work, your personal life, or your relationships. This is by no means easy, and to take a few more podcasts to unpack even those last few sentences, but this is the means by which you can attempt to create the life you want, rather than the life that simply happens to you. 1s So to conclude, you can derive many different stories from the same set of events. What's crucial is you can make the decision to while still looking at the situation honestly. Forged a story that will help you and move you forward. I would argue that a sign of psychological health is the ability to treat different situations that you run into in life as individual cases, and come away with distinct, unique stories from different events that we go through. Conversely, if you come away from many different situations with roughly the same story, for example, some individuals may leave every situation feeling cheated or taken advantage of or abandoned or misled. That might be a sign that you should look at what's happening at a psychological level. You can see how seeing ourselves through the lenses of transference, distortions of our thinking or our life scripts, just to name a few, can help us understand the story of our lives in the micro and the macro, and can give us the opportunity to be the architect of our own stories. Many people are simply NOtrillionEADY to hear this. To recognize their ongoing story, to examine it. To see where it's helping them and where it's not. To modify their self storytelling accordingly. It's a lifelong process. It requires careful attention and productivity, and many people are simply not up to the challenge. And that's okay, because people who are not ready for this kind of information will filter it out anyway. What about you? Can you think of examples from your own life where you had a transference reaction, or where your thinking became distorted? What are the themes of your life script? Do you agree or disagree with what we discussed today? If you have any feedback, you can contact us on social media or email us at Thinking Mind Podcast at gmail.com. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychology and self-development. If you like it, there are many ways you can support it. Can share it with a friend. Give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or if you listen and if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening.