by Jordan Sanders

For as long as human beings have used language as a tool for communication, stories have shaped our perception of life, the world, and ourselves. Great writers, musicians, poets, and filmmakers use storytelling all the time as a vehicle for entertainment, inspiration, and connection. We listen to Bob Dylan for tales of romance, conquered and lost; we watch Marvel films to be engrossed in a world filled with complicated heroes and even more complicated villains; and we read fiction to intimately understand the minds of people we’d never know otherwise. And whether we are conscious of it or not, we have multiple narratives running in our minds about who we are today, who we were in the past, and who we want to be in the future. Sometimes, these different narratives can conflict, which leaves us feeling uncertain about our own identity. A pressure can form that makes us feel like we must choose one specific narrative to define ourselves, while dismissing all others. Or, perhaps, we are being pressured to fit into a narrative by others that doesn’t feel authentic to ourselves. In the therapy room, a safe space can be formed that allows you to explore these different narratives to find out what fits into the story you want to tell about yourself, and what you want to place in the “Recycle Bin” icon of life.

Thinking about your life story can be a daunting task at first. When you come to see a therapist, you are bringing years and years worth of your life’s manuscript to the table to sift through, revisit, and determine how or if it fits into your new draft. Your therapist is there to give you space to decide what storylines you want to explore--and this can take time. It can take time to reexamine, edit, and assimilate years worth of material, and that’s OK. Sometimes it can be easier to choose major themes such as family, romantic love, or self-worth to focus on to break the narrative down into smaller parts.

There may be many pages written by other people in your manuscript that you’ve been wanting to edit for years. These pages might hold stories of hurt, pain, false beliefs, and sadness, and have been too difficult to read alone. Your therapist is there to give you space to read these pages, process them, and help you decide how you want to integrate them into your story. There’s no such thing as a good or bad story, but there are ways to tell a story that give us a renewed sense of purpose and authenticity. If you are having trouble figuring out how to make sense out of parts of your story, your therapist can help you by exploring your former and current strengths, values, and positive beliefs. These can provide a framework for rewriting difficult parts of your story in a way that will empower you.

Walt Whitman said it best when he said “I contain multitudes”. Through retelling your story, you may realize two opposing storylines about you are simultaneously true. A previous time in your life can be both joyful and sad, which is totally OK. Our stories are complex and contain nuance just like we all do. When you work on making meaning from a past storyline, it can be liberating to realize something wasn’t as simple as you originally thought. This type of nuance can be emboldening as you write a new narrative that allows for more fullness and richness of detail and context.