Once upon a time, there was … me.
Each of us creates an identity – a “self” – by mentally composing a life story based on memories, perceptions, and an imagined future. Sadly, our memories are incomplete and inaccurate, our perceptions are filtered through sensory limitations and caustic social conditioning, and our imagination is, by definition, unreal. Add to that our evolutionary legacy of a persistently negative bias (there’s probably a snake in those bushes) and, if left unattended, our internal narrative often skews toward the tragic.
“But my life is what it is,” you protest. Indeed, your life has unfolded as it has and will continue to unfold as it does. Nevertheless, your mental narrative of that unfolding is not an objective, unbiased account of your timeline from event to event. No, it’s a slanted retelling, embellished with incomplete memories, inferred motivations, negatively imagined consequences, and purely fictional forecasts. What’s worse, your social groups, including your family, your community, your country, and often the whole of humanity, frequently support and reinforce your negative self-narrative.
Unfortunately, we can’t simply stop the presses; our brains appear to be hard-wired to recall narratively. It’s how we establish our identity within our various groups and how we establish a sense of continuity. We are, in a very deep and real sense, storytelling creatures. Nevertheless, our inner narration need not remain unconscious. We can become aware of, witness, and impact the narrative process to great benefit.
Mindfulness Caveat
Before we discuss how to rectify our tendency to negatively recount our respective stories, permit me to highlight an important “but.” Yes, it helps to simply rewrite our internal tale. But, the highest and best result from all this noodling about narration is the realization that it’s all unreal – all of it. Once we can embrace the fictional nature of identity – the made-up self – we can more readily detach from, and stop identifying with, the ill effects of tragic tales, including those involving fear, loss, and failure, as well as the more positive plots involving quests and romance, and instead live gratefully through each here-and-now moment. But, let’s leave that idea for another post. For now, let’s talk about our rewrite.
Rewriting Your Life Story
Your main objective in rewriting your life story is to shift your primary narrative theme from scarcity and disappointment to sufficiency and gratitude. The instructions summarized below will help you to bring your unconscious narrative to the surface and provide you with some tools with which you might consciously revise your prior experience and more positively author your story going forward.
I recommend that you set aside an hour or two to write out the highlights of your past, present, and future, and to do the initial exercises. After that, it helps to revisit your rewrite briefly each day for a bit of ongoing story reflection. If you’ve instituted a daily meditation practice, adding a minute or two of “narrative editing” to the end of each session can be extremely beneficial.
Okay, here’s your rewrite recipe:
Step One: Write a synopsis of your past life, including where you were born and your memories about how and with whom you grew up. As part of the story of your past, describe at least 3 experiences that you believe negatively impacted your life. For example, were you or your family homeless? Were you bullied? Did your parents divorce? Were you severely injured? Were you arrested? Do you have a disability with which you had to cope? Then, for each of those negative experiences, briefly answer the following 2 questions:
– Why do you believe the experience happened?
– What do you believe about the world based on the experience?
Step Two: Write a synopsis of your present life, including a description of the person you are now and how you differ from your younger self. As part of this story of your present, describe at least 3 current character flaws that you believe prevent you from being happy. For example, are you too shy, too scared, or too lazy? Are you a quitter – the kind of person who never follows through?
Step Three: Describe your ideal future – how you would like your life to look in 10 years (20 years if you’re a youngster). Include a description of the goals you want to achieve and what type of person you want to be. Then, explore your fear, if any, about not achieving your desired future. If you fear that you will not reach one or more of your future goals, describe how you believe your life will actually look in 10 years.
Step Four: Starting with Step Four, it’s time to begin your rewrite. For each of the 3 negative experiences you listed in the “past” section of your story, write down a benefit that you received or an empowering lesson that you learned from each. For instance, let’s say that one of your negative experiences involved being bullied in school. What benefit or empowering lesson might you have taken from that experience? Did the experience toughen you a bit – make you more alert to your vulnerabilities or better able to withstand the slings and arrows of your teen years? Did the experience teach you that life involves struggle and that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and wiser? Be creative and think positively. If it helps, imagine that you are advising a friend as to how they might reframe their experience.
Step Five: For each of the 3 current character flaws you described in the “present” section of your story, recharacterize each “flaw” as a habit and commit to changing it. For instance, if one of your character flaws is that you identify yourself as “too shy” due to being bullied as a kid, rephrase that flaw by writing something like, “I’ve developed the habit of avoiding risks when I feel challenged; I can and will change that habit and learn to relish risks and appreciate challenges.”
Step Six: Most of us are conditioned to continually strive for improvement. We learn to value ambition and to eschew complacency. Never be satisfied; always be reaching; accumulate; elevate; win! That sort of conditioning can be thought of as “scarcity thinking” and creates a perpetual state of discontent and a constant yearning to achieve a future self that we imagine will be somehow better than our present self. Is it any wonder that so many of us live our days in a distracted state of unhappiness? Step Six offers you a chance to take a break from that existential dissatisfaction – to set aside your goals and dreams of a different, better future and instead pause and feel grateful for the chance to have experienced all that you have lived through to date. The remedy for all of your “future” thinking, including dreams, goals, and fears, is the same: rewriting those dreams, goals, and fears as desired states of mind. For instance, if one of your goals is to “get rich,” consider why you want to become wealthy. Do you believe that monetary wealth will provide you with a feeling of abundance or perhaps rid you of the stress of financial deficiency? If so, rewrite your goal to read, “I will learn and practice mindfulness and emotional regulation so that I feel less anxiety over my finances and more gratitude for all the things I have and will have in the future.”
Where To Go From Here
Again, your primary objective in rewriting your life story is to change the theme of your tale from negative to positive, from scarcity to abundance, and from disappointment to gratitude. After you have spent some time exploring and rewriting your life story, spend just a few moments each day paying attention to your inner dialogue, which indicates how you are continuing to unconsciously write your narrative. Catch your catastrophic pronouncements, such as “if I don’t finish this project today, I’ll be fired for sure,” and reframe them in a positive, self-accepting tone, such as “I’ll focus and do my best, as always.” Catch your overgeneralizations, such as “people are no damned good,” and dig into them with a positive turn of phrase, such as “everyone has a bad day.” Soon, your tale will begin to naturally and unconsciously unfold as a success story to be gratefully enjoyed rather than a tragedy to be endured.
Was This Article Helpful?
Please let me know here whether you enjoyed this article and if you have suggestions or questions. And if you’d like to sign up for regular emails, click here.