Learning to embrace our rich story

So, in last weeks post I looked at the ways that we get caught up in our hypothesis of who we are & the ways that this can lead us to develop very thin & restrictive stories about ourselves & our capacities to cope with the challenges life may bring us.

Along with that powerful reminder that we shouldn’t marry our hypothesis of ourselves I love the way narrative therapy also reminds us to notice that we are not our problem story - the problem is the problem & we can shift the narrative in our story.

All too often as we are developing our thin & restricted story of ourselves – the one that makes us block out & dismiss anything that seems to contradict our story of who we are - we start to blur the margins; we stop noticing the weave of our narrative & begin to inhabit our story with all the problems it seems to bring us. All too soon we don’t have a problem; we are the problem.

You hear it in the way we speak –

• ‘I’m anxious/a worrier’ & ‘My anxiety stops me ... ‘

• ‘I’m an angry person’ & ‘My anger means I …. ‘

• ‘I’m a procrastinator’ & ‘My procrastination means I … ‘

Our thin story shifts the qualities of our problem we are facing into personal attributes that flavour & define how we see ourselves & our responses.

So, if my anxiety & worries lead me to feel triggered when I try new things then I soon believe that there is no point in even trying something new - my anxiety & worries have extended my thin story to tell me I’m not kind of person who could be adventurous or take risks.

If my anger means I often feel overwhelmed by my emotions, I soon start to believe that my emotions are to be feared so I push them away & my anger has extended my thin story to tell me that I should avoid all situations where I might feel overwhelmed.

If my procrastination means I struggle to complete or stick with stuff, then I soon start to believe there is no point in even starting something new – my procrastination has extended my thin story to say that I’m the kind of person who’s gonna fall at the first hurdle.

But our problem story of ourselves has not emerged in a vacuum – it’s developed within the social & emotional context of our lived experience & when we get forensic about our story’s origins, we begin to understand its language.

As I mentioned last week these include the lenses that inflect both the ways that we experience our own lives. We all grow in the context of a family that’s evolving through time & responding in the ways it knows to various predictable & unpredictable events & circumstances – a family has beliefs & stories about itself & its members that get passed down through generations & a family that shapes & shifts itself in response to the social & cultural norms, values & changes that are occurring within communities & society from the national to international stage.

The lenses that are inflecting our story may be visible or invisible; spoken about or not spoken about & sometimes they may even be invisible to us & those around us, but each of these lenses adds imperceptible depth & detail to our thin story until we decide to make them visible.

Take anxiety -

When we begin to notice how our family, our community & society more generally has held & holds anxiety & all the ways that this might be affected by our gender, by our race, by our ethnicity or our religious or non-religious upbringing; by our health & wellbeing; by our sexuality or sexual orientation & by our level of education & our class or socio-economic status we begin to find layers of rich detail that are woven into the ways we tell our story that inflect our relationship with anxiety & the challenges it may be bringing us.

So, firstly, how was anxiety held within our family?

Did everyone in the family respond to life events & transitions with anxiety & just as importantly was this visible & noticed within our family or something that was invisible & suppressed/denied because remember not all anxious responses are about getting tearful & flapping about, they are also about getting angry – becoming dysregulated & exploding or numbing out & can be about getting rigidly hyperregulated or imploding. The angry explosions are visible while the hyperregulated numb implosions may be invisible even to family members themselves & this range of responses may not be perceived by the family as anxious responses at all.

If our family story of anxiety has common communication currency but we have a different way of holding & responding to anxiety, then our family’s ability to attune to our way of coping will massively affect how we feel towards ourselves & our anxiety. If we are a quiet contained anxious imploder & we live with a family of volatile anxious exploders, then their experience of their own & our anxiety will deeply affect our relationship with ourselves & our anxiety.

Then we need to think about how anxiety was & is held socially in our community?

Is acknowledging anxiety perceived as a weakness? If it is perceived as a mental health issue, how is mental health held in our community – is it something that is seen as a weakness or even perceived as shameful? Our ability to respond to our own anxiety with compassion is deeply affected by how it has been held & we have been held in our community.

Our ability to experience our & hold our anxiety is also powerfully affected & inflected by our gender & the ways that this intersect with our race & class & our ethnicity in a myriad of ways that are visible & invisible.

E.g. my experience of anxiety as a white Scottish woman who grew up working class but who is no longer living in Scotland & is educationally perceived as middle class has so many layers. My apparently visible class & my gender & race all give privilege & degrees social acceptance to a flapping tearful response to anxiety & if I show anxiety in this way this can elicit a compassionate response from others, but this can then make me feel uncomfortable with myself because I know others are not afforded this privilege. The more invisible layers of my cultural origins & historical class are however telling me to ‘get a grip’ & ‘pull yourself together’ & ‘stop making a show of yourself’ because in my family & in my community more generally anxiety was perceived as ‘weak’ in a culture that favoured a stoic & contained approach to life’s challenges. These invisible layers then sit alongside my own personal cultural values & attitudes towards race & ethnicity that tell me that ‘really you don’t have it so bad’ & ‘you are being self-pitying & self-indulgent’ & ‘you can if you choose to or even if you don’t even intend to leverage privilege that are not afforded & are specifically used to oppress others’ & this makes me feel anger at social oppression that has a backwash of disgust & shame that I’m given a privilege I don’t want. All of this feeds into my lived experience of my own anxiety.

So, our thin story & all the problems it may bring are something that is just part of us; it’s a response that has a genealogy of attitudes & attributes that are flavoured by social & cultural boundaries.

Stepping outside the confines of our story helps us to externalise its issues & get really specific about how it is showing up.

So, sticking with anxiety, we can begin to see it as a character within our story & notice how this anxiety character behaves - what it says & does & what it wants & doesn’t want for us. My understanding of how to explore the character of a problem & how it shows up has been guided & informed by Alice Morgan in her amazing book What is Narrative Therapy? Her work helped me to explore & understand my own thin stories & gave me some of the tools & framework that have developed my capacity to hold others on their own journey of self-discovery.

So, let’s flesh out this anxiety character a bit more.

• How does anxiety speak to us? What kind of tone of voice does it have? What specific words come up when we are experiencing anxiety – are they harsh, dismissive, unkind, judgemental?
  

• Think about what this anxiety likes & dislikes – when is it happy & when is it well out of its comfort zone?
  

• How does it operate & what kinds of tactics does it use when it shows up in our story – does it have rules for how we can & can’t behave & does it play tricks & tell lies to us about who we are & how we can cope?
  

• What are its beliefs & ideas about itself & about us – what we are entitled to & what we deserve?
  

• What are its intentions & plans for us?
  

• How can we recognise when its shown up & has taken charge of our narrative?
  

• Does it recruit allies to support it? Who are they & how do they behave?
  

So, for me, my anxiety has always had a very harsh, cruel & judgy voice. It tells me in very brutal shouty voice that my own anxiety is weak & self-indulgent & even if I can afford compassion to others, I personally am not entitled to feel this way.

It has very different beliefs & standards for others - it has always extended kindness & compassion to anxiety in others whilst refusing to offer even a sliver of this empathy towards me. It’s always taken every possible step to hide & disguise this double standard & positions even an instance of my observing this double standard as an example of my self-indulgent & an example of my whining special pleading that’s unacceptable because others have things so much worse than I do.

Its rules are that I always have to try harder & be more resilient that anyone else & moments when crack show are examples of my weakness & lack or worth. These rules however always place me in a one down relationship with others because it is simply impossible to try as hard & be as resilient as anxiety would want me to be. I can only ever be at most second best, so it always has me under a judgemental cosh.

I do know when anxiety’s taking over because it steals my words – even though I have ideas I can’t articulate them & I feel myself closing up & I feel an intense pulling inwards & downwards in my body that saps all my energy in the moment & later when I have extended periods of physical pain in my back & in my hips that can go on for days & even weeks, reminding me that stepping up or out of my comfort zone is very costly physically & emotionally.

Its intention has always been to keep me small & invisible & it puts this into action by screaming ‘Warning danger danger danger’ whenever I take risks, try new things or step out of my comfort zone & it consolidates its intention by saying ‘You see, what did you expect, I told you not for us’ whenever stuff doesn’t work our exactly as I planned. It really doesn’t mind whether I’m standing on a stage before 100s or in a room with people I know & like, it might be louder or quieter depending on the situation but its always there looking for the stay small.

It has a couple of really good friends that back it up in every situation where I try to step out of my comfort zone. These mean friends are Perfectionism & Imposter Syndrome. Perfectionism joins forces with anxiety & says ‘Not good enough’ ‘others do it so much better’ while Imposter Syndrome chips in with ‘who do you think you are?’ ‘get real, you are not the kind of person who can do this’ ‘others can do it so much better & they can all see through you right here & right now, they know you know nothing so get back in your corner’.

As I began to flesh out my story, I started out with feeling annoyed – I was angry & sad about all the ways that anxiety had held & still holds me back but then I noticed that fear was the untold & hidden story behind every aspect of my anxiety. Fear of being spotlighted, exposed & shamed. This helped me to notice that this anxiety as it shows up in my life today made its first appearances in childhood when I felt scared that I was too much – that my emotions might be seen as too much or I when felt I was being noticed as clever or talented or different to my peers & worried they might feel I would act too big for my boots. This was when anxiety first clamped my body & shut me down my voice – it made me want to shrink because it wanted to keep me safe from judgement & rejection.

This helped me realise that my anxiety is felt through the lens of the survival instinct of a child & so I needed to approach it as such, holding it in the way that I would a child experiencing & displaying big emotions. Being angry or dismissive or rejecting – all my routine go-to behaviours towards my anxiety – were not going to make it go away, they were only fuelling my self-judging mean bifurcated response. Pushing away the anxiety I experience - trying to make it go away - is in fact an act of self-rejection & self- abandonment - an acting out that rejection I most feared as a child. I realised that instead, I needed to hold this anxiety with her friends perfectionism & imposter syndrome & their secret buddy fear with all the kindness & compassion that I would give without hesitation to scared kids who were acting out.

This shift towards self-compassion & self-acceptance helps me to accept my anxiety as just part of my story – the part that always wants to keep me safe. It’s not bad – we all want to be safe – it’s just a younger part of me being triggered & asking for parental support. When I am able to step into this adult, parental part of me I can hold anxiety & her friends with kindness & understanding helping them to settle down & allow space for other stories to be heard.

If you are interested in fleshing out the detail so you can learn to build a healthier relationship with the stories you hold within you do contact me laura@lbrucetherapies.com.

Warm wordy hugs

Laura