Attachment to Our Stories — and Letting Go

We all have stories we tell ourselves.

You might even go so far as to call it our personal mythologies. Regardless, these are stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we stand for, and what reality looks like.

In many cases, these are the remnants of "survival tools" we picked up when we were children, something that holds especially true for those of us who went through rather dodgy childhoods or even abusive ones.

The thing about stories is that we tend to grow very attached to them.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing all by itself, but sometimes we grow attached to a story that isn't actually true anymore. Something may have been true many years ago when we were 10 years old and needed to find some way to cope with the very difficult situation, but now that we are fully adults and have some years under our belts the story doesn't really apply anymore.

And yet we cling to it like a burr in the storm because it offers us a measure of safety, and stepping out into the unknown the lies beyond our established stories is often somewhat scary.

In a sense, we can think of our stories as a sort of emotional security blanket.

Now, there's nothing wrong with having a story or a personal mythology... unless we reach a point in our lives where our stories are actually getting in the way of our progressing in life. Instead of the story being something that helps us deal with everyday life it has become a "fence" that we stubbornly refuse to tear down or jump overbecause we're frightened by the potential of what lays on the other side.

Sometimes all our stories need is a little bit of reframing. I remember a friend of mine who was always claiming that he was "afraid of failure" because he'd grown up with a really tough and unsympathetic dad. And so he worked extremely hard to always excel at absolutely everything he did and yet he never really seemed to get the success he wanted. And this kept going on even years after his dad was dead.

After he worked with a psychologist for a while it turned out that he wasn't really afraid of failure at all he was afraid of success!

As long as he was "failing slightly," he felt that he was able to deal with his dad's judgments and statements that he would never amount to much of anything, but what he really feared was building such genuine success that he felt truly empowered but then he would still have to face his dad who he felt would invariably not think it was good enough.

One of my own attachments I had to let go of some years ago was the idea that "doing your best" means you're going to be successful. Of course, that isn't exactly true... doing your best might make you successful, but sometimes your best isn't actually good enough.

And sometimes what you want to be successful at isn't really relevant to anyone but yourself, so you're faced with solving the issue of who you are trying to be successful FOR.

Another story I had to put to rest some years ago was my dad's insistence that I was "a clumsy oaf."

Maybe I wasn't particularly graceful as a very "oversized" 12-year old... but it was not a story I needed to confess to my college dates (and beyond) who could see absolutely no evidence that I was a clumsy oaf.

Whatever our stories might be, they do definitely bear examining and being fact checked in view of what is currently true of our lives!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Do you have any stories you believe to be true about yourself... that perhaps aren't? What would it take for you to change your story? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.06.03 23:57 PDT
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