How Our Stories F@*! With Us

And two exercises that will help

One of the hardest parts of physical distancing is the discovery that it’s not so easy to distance ourselves from internal dialogue.

That inner chatter, in fact, is likely louder than ever. With added stress and uncertainty, we may be more on edge and more easily have our buttons pushed. Yet, we’re simultaneously slowed down as our outside world offers less distractions.

You may have experienced this phenomenon before, if you’ve done a meditation retreat. As we begin a retreat, with our usual outside world gone, the first thing we see is that our inner stories seem even louder.

Whether we’re aware of them or not – and especially if not – our inner stories affect how we view and communicate with the outside world. To communicate well with others, then, the first thing we need to do is look carefully and be ruthlessly honest about our own inner dialogues. 

We all have our stories

Even on average day, we make assumptions and jump to conclusions multiple times. Right now, many of us are at home and our lives have been disrupted. While spending more time than usual with loved ones, then, you may also be experiencing more virtual communication with key people in your life, which is more easy to misinterpret.

It’s a prime situation for your inner stories to come up nice and clearly.

With our physical movements restricted, our frequent stories are likely knocking up lots more air miles:

“Sally hasn’t replied to my email, so that means….”
“John kept very quiet in that online meeting, so that means…”
“Why does he keep doing that, he mustn’t love me…”

Not you? Take a moment and think of your own frequently played stories.

It can be hard to admit that we have a strong, “poor me” or “that’s not fair” reflex, because they seem so childish. Especially if they’re in reaction to a professional colleague or one of our children – we’re supposed to be the grown-ups, right?

Yet, until we admit what’s going on when we end a meeting in a bad state for no good reason, or feel resentment all day about an innocent comment from our partner, these stories will continue to own us like the two-year old tantrum that they are.

Stopping the snowball effect

We can stop this, by paying attention to the little details. Often, we feed our stories by taking select data that we’re over-sensitive to, like someone’s facial expression or a tone of voice.

Do any of these resonate, as triggers or patterns of yours?

• Overreacting to an email and rereading it an hour later in a totally different light?
• Convinced all day that someone was mad at you, only to find out they weren’t at all?
• That someone looked like they were disagreeing with you or ignoring you, when in fact they were totally on board?

Does this sound familiar? Isn’t this how our day goes, when we get stuck in unconscious-reactive mode?

Unless we learn and keep vigilant to these details and our stories, they’ll snowball, uncontrolled, through our day.

Here are a couple of exercises that might help you get leverage under yours.

The exercises

1) Make a list of what you think are some of your common stories.

Here are some examples,

• That’s not fair.
• I don’t deserve this. / I deserve better than this.
• Why should I have to…?
• Poor me.
• Poor him/her.
• Me again?
• They don’t value my contribution.
• I’m not loved.
• Nobody listens to me.

You might already be aware of them, especially if you’re working with teachers or spiritual friends who have helped you see what are often our blind spots. This is the advantage of having teachers like our Doug Sensei and Catherine Sensei, and being part of Clear Sky’s community – our stories are mirrored or shown to us as a core part of the work.

2) Over the next few days, look for when these stories come up and pay attention:

• What piece of information triggered the story/ feeling?
• Are you ignoring other information, and only seeing what backs up your story?
• What are other possible scenarios about the person or situation that brought up your story?
• What assumptions are you making?
• Can you allow for the possibility of where you are wrong?

The more we recognise our frequent stories and how they’re triggered, the less they will be in control.

This blog was inspired by teachings on communication and inner stories by Karen McAllister and Duncan Cryle during a live webinar on Keeping Connection With Others Despite Social Distancing on April 7, 2020. For more tools on how to make communication more conscious check out our current online offerings.

Photo Credit:  whoislimosI on Unsplash