Don’t marry your hypothesis – flirt & grow into all that you can be.

Systemic family therapist Barbara Lichner advises that when it comes to trying to resolve a problem, we should not marry our hypothesis, we should instead flirt with different ideas & try to make sense of the problem by understanding how it works & just what it is bringing to the table.

I loved this idea when I began training in systemic family therapy - the playful expression & the way that it highlights that when it comes to solving ‘problems’ we are all too quick to jump on one theory & prescribe a solution but if we allow ourselves space to step back we can begin to notice that what seems like the problem is often a symptom of the way that a family is interacting within itself & within social systems more broadly. This capacity to step back allows families to explore themselves – their values beliefs & experiences & the ways they are contributing, positively as well as negatively, to the issues that they are experiencing empowering them work to together to generate different ideas for how to unpick the issue & how to sustain change going forwards.

As I’ve moved into training in holistic therapies this expression ‘don’t marry your hypothesis’, has resonated, sat with me & stirred thoughts within me on so many levels.

When it comes to our mindset, I think we find it all to easy to marry our hypothesis of who we are & to begin to see & respond to ourselves in terms of our hypothesis – we are an anxious or unflappable; introvert or extrovert; proactive or passive & we view our actions, our behaviours & responses in terms of this hypothesis of ‘who we are’. As we marry this idea of ourselves, we tend to become more & more of the person we think & believe we are – we grow into our own version of ourselves - we focus & magnify only the issues & experiences that fit with our version of who we are & we stop noticing or we actively reject the stuff that contradicts our hypothesis.

When it comes to our emotional & physical wellbeing, when something comes up or we feel challenges it’s all too easy to reach out & marry our hypothesis of the issues & any diagnosis & treatment. We are the one with the back issue, the hip issue; the high blood pressure or the mental health issue - the anxiety or the issue with anger – we see ourselves & our lives in terms of our problem & allow the problem & what we accept as the solution to define & confine our life.

& marrying our hypothesis is comforting – it seems to offer us an explanation – a sense of safety in what feels like the comforting security of ‘an answer’. But just like rushing into a hasty marriage to someone  who seems on paper to be ‘the one’, perhaps because they offer a quick route to status, security & safety or to banishing fears we may have, when we have not given ourselves the opportunity to really getting to know that person as they function & cope in the complexity of life, marrying our hypothesis is limiting, somewhat short-sighted & can end in tears.

So systemic therapists suggest that rather than jump to the first hypothesis it is more productive to flirt with different ideas, to take time to see the family system as a whole & really try to understand the issue & its symptoms within their landscape to really see how they functions & what they contribute to the family system as a whole. I love bringing this idea into my thinking on mindset & somatic (body-based) therapies because it sits so well with a holistic approach to understanding how dis-ease can develop within our mind, our body, spirit & our energetic systems.

Over the next weeks I want to explore this idea of not marrying our hypothesis & instead opening up to understand what may be happening to us & within our system in terms of the landscape of our mind, body, spirit & energetic systems.

Today I want to consider the ways that we can become married to our story of who we are & reflect on how we can open up to the possibilities of all we can be when we flirt with other stories that we may be shutting down because they don’t fit with our narrative of who we think we are.

Narrative therapy is a theory that just sings to me & has helped me find a vocabulary to speak about ideas I’d had that for too long had remained amorphous & incoherent thoughts that I instinctively sensed but somehow couldn’t fully articulate. When we lack language, we cannot clearly communicate our thoughts & ideas & our needs & desires – we need vocabulary to bring order to the ideas fermenting within.

Narrative therapy is grounded in the belief that as we grow, we develop stories about ourselves that we then carry with us, often unquestioningly, through our lives & it explores the ways that these stories we have about ourselves then bring meaning & influence the ways that we understand & respond to our lived experience.

These stories we live & stories we tell have a profound influence on our lives – they inform our sense of self-esteem, abilities, relationships & work. The stories we tell ourselves & the language we use to tell these stories – to ourselves & to others - help us to organise, understand & maintain the reality we are living ie the way we talk about our experience helps us make sense of our experience.

When we recognise this, it is easy to see that our experiences are not fixed, they are profoundly affected by the ways we perceive & explain what happened & the perspectives we accept.

The same event, even something ‘upsetting’ like a rejection - might feel profoundly disempowering or liberating depending on the stories we have previously accumulated about the experience & our capacity to cope with rejection.

I love the power that narrative therapy offers us because when we are aware of the influence of our stories, we can become an active narrator in our lives – it is our gift to choose the script we want to adopt.

So how does our narrative – our stories of ourselves - develop?

So much of our narrative of ourselves emerges during our childhood. We often play down the depth of influence that our childhood has on us, tending to think that our sense of self - the beliefs & values that define us - form as we develop greater agency as teenagers & as adults but in fact so many of our beliefs & values have actually been laid down in childhood, formed & informed by our social environment.

As children we are like sponges - we learn how to understand & relate to our world from the responses of those around us. We first learn how to respond to & process our emotions & to make sense of ourselves & our world within the context of our family & our social environment & like an unfurling map, our family itself has been informed & formed within the context of the upbringing, life & experiences of our parents & grandparents.

This context affects the way we perceive ourselves & our first story about ourselves & our capacity to cope is one formed in our childhood as our parents describe our behaviour to us, giving context & meaning to our emotional responses. The myriad of lenses that our family is looking through – lenses of gender, race & ethnicity, class & culture, religion or sexuality etc - may be visible or even invisible, spoken about or unheard & even unseen but as a child, we absorb their lens as our own & we experience their perception of us as a true account that then affects our own perception of ourselves.

Do you remember how your family used to describe you?   

Were you the quiet one or the chatterbox?

Were you described as the good child or the rascal?

Were you the peacemaker everyone went to or were you the one who seemed to be at the heart of every conflict?

The ways we were perceived & described affects us & become one of the lenses we learn to see ourselves through & this lens can be very powerful & pervasive even when we are aware of its presence.

So how does this play out in our lives as we grow up? This story & the lens of the storyteller gathers evidence like a snowball until it can begin to crowd out other stories of who we are.

As someone who was always seen as quiet & self-contained & emotionally resilient, I have always found it hard to challenge & shift this narrative – the story is strong & its familiarity feels like a comfort zone & so it’s a narrative that I naturally slip into at times where I feel overwhelmed or out of my depth.

But it’s a story that suppressed truths & other stories – that I often felt emotionally overwhelmed as a child & I regularly pushed down emotions that I felt were too much because I felt that they might overwhelm others. So, rather than being self-contained & emotionally resilient I was learning to bypass my emotions entirely as a way to help me feel safe within myself. This story was unheard & unseen when I was a child & as I grew up it also became an unwanted & very uncomfortable story because it challenged my dominant narrative of myself as a ‘coper’.

In narrative therapy this story of me as a quiet, self-contained emotionally resilient coper is known as a ‘thin’ story. There are lots of reasons why we may be behaving in a particular way – for me I was pushing away overwhelming feelings because I worried that they might overwhelm others & I also had a deep fear of rejection that had roots in social change within my home town & community & the experience of friends I made regularly moving away – but  thin descriptions eliminate the detail to give us just the one story – ‘Laura is a quiet resilient coper’.

Thin stories can generally be traced back to stories or descriptions of us that were created by adults who are explaining us & our behaviours to us. So, my parents & teachers witnessed my quiet containment & this made me easy to be around – a ‘good’ kid - & they didn’t particularly notice that I often seemed to have new friendships that didn’t last because kids fall in & out with friends regularly & so they prioritised this thin story of my coping resilience & described my behaviour to me as such. It’s positive attributes – my family & my teachers approved of my behaviour & seemed to be observing that I was doing well in what I was experiencing as a state of constant flux – then became a story that I wanted to identify with which then encouraged me to further push away the uncomfortable stories as unwanted & unacceptable because if I let them out, I might destroy this approved story of myself which might then unleash the rejection I feared the most.

Thin stories like this often become internalised as part of our sense of self & they if get repeatedly activated they become embedded as part of our current story of ourselves encouraging us to unconsciously understand our actions & behaviours through their thin descriptive lens going forwards.

But thin descriptions lead to thin conclusions about our identity that can have many negative effects. As our thin story with its thin conclusions gets expressed, accepted & even internalised as a truth about who we are, it can also spawn problem-saturated stories that focus on our weaknesses, our dysfunctions & our inadequacy rather than our resilience or strength which can lead us to understand our problems & even ourselves as ‘bad’ or ‘hopeless’.

& so my thin story allowed me to prioritise a ‘positive’ image of myself & my capacity to cope but it also led me to create strict divisions around positive & negative attributes that fuelled perfectionism which in turn led me to police my boundaries so I could hold onto & project my ‘good’ coping qualities & reject those feelings that were difficult or uncomfortable as emotional dysregulation - ‘bad’ negative attributes that I needed to avoid.

It didn’t erase those emotions, it just made them feel dangerous & it created an equally strong unspoken internal thin story – a sub-plot of myself as someone who couldn’t cope & who could be exposed as such & then rejected. This was uncomfortable as a child as I always felt emotionally unsafe – like I might burst the dam & spill emotionally at any moment – but it became toxic for me on a physical, emotional, energetic & spiritual level over time because all of our unprocessed emotions do not just disappear, they get held in our bodies, affecting us physically & energetically & they restrict the depth & complexity of our emotional development, impacting on our sense of ourselves & our capacity to engage & thrive within relationships whether intimate, friendships or professional - we do not ever feel safe to be fully ourselves because we fear that those untold stories might destroy not just the image others hold of us but the relationships themselves.

By the time I realised & was able to admit to myself that my bifurcated story of myself as a resilient coper/emotional wreck was a problem story I was suffering from chronic joint, back & hip pain from years of pushing down anger grief & sadness; I’d been through several difficult relationships with emotionally unavailable partners & personally & professionally I’d become a giver who held & contained the emotional distress of others but struggled to risk asking for such support herself without feeling like I was drowning in shame at my weakness.   

Now I do love a plot twist & in my case this came in the form of my getting to train in narrative therapy just before being made redundant from the very role that I was learning to practice it in. It felt like finally finding the vocabulary to articulate amorphous thoughts only to be unceremoniously booted out of the account – talk about triggering my thin story – you couldn’t make it up.

Out came the resilient coper with her story of ‘I will survive’. Within a week I had apparently dealt with the shock of it all & was using that unexpected bolt from the blue to push me to do what I had secretly craved to do for years – to learn more about holistic therapies & to find a way to work for myself.

& that was great because it empowered my learning & I wow was hungry to learn because being a clever woman was another of my safe stories of myself that I could tap into to ease & distract me from the raw pain of redundancy.

But underneath the unwanted untold story of rejection & the dangerous world of emotional overwhelm was also triggered, The brutality of the redundancy under Covid meant that the bogeyman of my childhood fear of emotions & the horror of rejection was out there live & kicking in my adult world & I was having to face a plethora of my worst nightmare of emotions – anger, fear, shame & guilt – if this had happened to me then logically it must be my fault.

But just like the veritable DJ, it was narrative therapy that saved my life from a broken heart.

Now I love the way that narrative therapy helps us open up & explore the dominant narrative of stories that we have about ourselves & encourages us to try to identify & flesh out “alternative” storylines that exist beyond the confines of our problem story.

I love the way it helps us understand the ways that that the meaning we may have ascribed to life events – all the threads that have become interwoven into the plot of our thin story – have so often been reached in the face of adversity when our options were low & we felt like our backs were against the wall & so all detail has been eliminated because our ‘thin description' left little space for the complexities & contradictions of life.

I love the way it encourages us to open up space for alternative stories that offer contrast & detail to the thin sparsity of our problem story, stories that contradict & breach its boundaries & bring to the surface the full spectrum of our true nature in all of its beautiful complexity.

& this is the way narrative therapy supported my healing

It allowed me to understand the detail in ways that my thin story of being an emotionally resilient coper was functioning in my life – that it was drawing me – personally & professionally - towards relationships where I could support others, allowing them comfort for all the difficult & uncomfortable emotions I couldn’t allow myself which by extension let me process those emotions at one step removed whilst also judging myself as unworthy of having the same support myself.

It helped me to see that I could create space & flesh out different stories with new & healthier plotlines that would allow me to embrace versions of myself in all my complexity. 

It helped me recognise that what I’d always feared as my emotional vulnerability, was actually a strength. While I feared that my silent story of emotional overwhelm might erupt & overrun my resilient coper story, when I spoke with others I found that they didn’t just respect the ways that I could speak about & hold their emotions, they also admired the ways that I often wore my heart on my sleeve – those moments when I felt my resilient façade cracked & I shared the raw emotional wounds inside – moment that I’d often went home & tortured myself about as examples of my emotional weakness & lack of containment.

It helped me accept that if I was able to understand their feelings & hold others emotionally then with this new found space I could learn to process these emotions within myself & I could recruit other stories from other areas of my life eg my passion for learning to teach myself more about emotional wellbeing & mental health so I could create a safety net for myself as I opened up to understanding the richness, depth & complexity of my own emotional world.

It helped me acknowledge that if I could open up & feel safe with the full range of my own emotional vocabulary this was not just a win & a healthier outcome for me, it also deepened my capacity to support others & brought a healthier & more substantial depth to my story of myself as a resilient coper – I was not longer coping for others to push down my own fear of internal collapse; I could expand & hold others even more closely & confidently because I could hold myself.

It helped me expand my knowledge & my aspirations, recruiting my love of learning to reframe my understanding of my own physical pain & learn to hold & heal it in ways that I’d dreamt of but felt was out of my grasp so that I could learn how to help others to do the same.

So, after what felt like a lifetime married to that early hypothesis - that thin story of myself as a resilient coper/secret emotional wreck - I finally learned to flirt, enriching the depth of my stories of who I am to become so much more of the woman I’d always so wanted to be.

If you are interested to learn more about narrative therapy to help you challenge the thin stories that may be constricting your life do contact me laura@lbrucetherapies.com.

Warm wordy hugs

Laura xx