Your story is overrated.

(in a nice way)

Wait, should I just become a leadership training grifter? Is it too late?

Edit: it has been 9 weeks since I wrote the next sentence. I can’t look at it anymore. I don’t know why I do this. lol:

I haven’t posted anything here in a long time. I’ve been busy with other things, but this substack has been on the back of my mind the whole time. The truth is that I’m struggling with the visibility. I have loved writing in a longer form at a slower pace, and I also have found that posting something on a blog gives the impression of certainty and strategic positioning than a long instagram story paragraph can’t. The instagram story form imparts meaning about its content: it’s here briefly. It captures my thoughts framed as a snapshot in time. It’s only for those seeking it out. A blog post that lands in someone’s email inbox that could have been written for hours? days? weeks? it had better be clear, edited, something I can stand behind and defend. I’d like readers to imagine this as something in between, and to and remember how profoundly unimportant I am. Criticism is welcome, but a response isn’t obligatory. Please remember that I am only saying what I am saying and I am not saying anything I am not saying.

To dip my toes back in the water of perceptibility, something quick and relatively non-political. I’m here to make an inconsequential claim. This one should be relatable to private sector workers, especially those of the professional managerial class. Because we’re all being overrun by fake experts saying fake deep stuff about “storytelling”.

The era of owning of Your Story™ is not unrelated to the era of unmitigated social media use, which really means unmitigated marketing. “Storytelling” is the communication strategy of our time across industries. The hippies and the suits and the normies and the social justicey people are all embracing their stories.

This made it feel normal to hear about it so much in my training as a social worker and psychotherapist. A task of a therapist, I was told, was to help people tell their stories. Sounds normal. Actually, it sounded kinda deep at the time. Many different therapies utilize story, including the popular evidence-based practices such as CBT, in which clients are encouraged to draw new conclusions from experiences and even practice replacing unhelpful thoughts with new, more helpful thoughts to yield new behaviors and emotional experiences. Storytelling is a central theme of narrative therapy, in which people are empowered to take control of their own experiences and make sense of them. Certainly, there are people that benefit from naming their experiences and creating arcs that impart positive self-image and greater awareness. I’m not knocking it.

But the act of purposefully constructing any story out of one’s life has consequences. I say purposefully because I acknowledge that as humans with the gift of language, we are cursed to construct stories whether we want to or not. What I am arguing is that the centering of story can be destructive in many cases.

Right after I finished my CBT class, I took a class on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a third-wave behavioral therapy evolving from CBT and Relational Frame Theory (RFT) that incorporates Buddhist influences and uses a framework called functional contextualism. ACT focuses on increasing psychological flexibility through reality acceptance and behavior change instead of resigning to experiential avoidance and struggling through the resulting suffering. ACT highlights the way that language traps us in stories and and limits our potential. Not how bad language traps us. Language in general. One of the core concepts of ACT is “self-as-context” in contrast to “self-as-content”. Self-as-context is the place from which we get information through our senses, and experience is had. Sometimes known as the observer self, it also describes the intangible, ever-changing nature of the self. This is the self we experience when we’re in the present present, noticing what is happening inside and around us. Self-as-content concerns our known verbal self-concept. Whenever you say “I’m the kind of person who _____”, you’re doing self-as-content. It’s normal and healthy to notice patterns and be aware of our patterns, but having strong beliefs about ourselves unintentionally creates behavioral rigidity. For example, if “I’m stubborn'“, I play out the behavioral script I always do, cutting off possibilities to engage in the world in different ways based on how might I feel in a particular time and place. If you’re “bad with change”, well, best of luck rewriting your story, boss. We all know we’re not supposed to do “negative self-talk”, but according to ACT, affirmations like '“I am strong” also limit us. What do we get out of holding onto a positive belief about ourselves that we can’t live up to?

This is humiliating, but when I was 19, struggling with my identity, I wrote on my mirror “I am a badass bitch from hell that no one can fuck with”. I said it out loud when I saw it for like 5 weeks. Something I must have seen on tumblr. But when I was crying because someone hurt me, when life revealed to me that I could be fucked with and I wasn’t a badass bitch, I felt the pain of being hurt plus the pain of fighting the fact that I could be hurt so badly. In ACT¹ this is the difference between pain and suffering². Pain is an unavoidable part of life and suffering is not. Pain + resistance/denial/distress/struggling = suffering.

The power of positive thinking isn’t a groundbreaking concept, no matter how it’s rebranded. If saying positive things about ourselves worked, everyone who has ever posted on LinkedIn would be healthy and happy beyond belief. We all know that those paragraphs your old coworker wrote about their struggle and redemption are not congruent with the thoughts they have before they fall asleep.

To me, every list of strengths and positive beliefs about oneself offered as an “alternative thought” on a CBT worksheet just sounds like a long instagram caption that started with “4 months ago, I would have never thought that I would be where I am today...” I don’t think our mental wellbeing actually has anything to do with anything we might say after an interviewer asks us to tell them about ourselves. We can’t force ourselves to believe in ourselves. We can’t always make ourselves think that we’re the heroes of our own stories. If you are finding that that’s the case for you, I suggest you drop the story.

Narrative therapists would argue that the intervention of “re-authoring” speaks to our ability to change our stories when they’re no longer working for us. That the whole orientation helps us become aware of our stories and thus empowers us to examine and intervene in them. But the image of The Story still imparts the idea that there is a story that does work, even if just for now. As if we’re studying for an exam, we can repeat a chunk of language back to ourselves until it sticks, until it becomes natural.

My belief is that storytelling became a tool for all of the industries’ c-suites because it’s emotionally resonant and lacks material consequences. Your therapist assigning you a narrative exercise does really want you to turn inward and consider changing the way you understand yourself and the world in order to change your behavior and emotions. This process has a different benefit for your boss: no matter how hard or honestly you “speak to your experience”, the response to storytelling remains simply listening. Storytelling as a paradigm shifts the expectations. You’re expected to share personal details about your life. Maybe you emote openly in a professional setting. Others are expected to listen to your (ideally marginalized) voice. You are now likely more emotionally invested in your workplace, and all management has to do is sit there and witness you. In this position, you're not likely to see your relationship to your employer as antagonistic. Is this always a bad thing? If you're a worker, yes. If you're looking out for yourself, there is no scenario in which your boss should know about what makes you cry. I value emotional intimacy more than anything, yet since graduate school, no boss has known anything about my family³ or my living situation for years. Your story is their ammo, not yours. When you're burned out and request time off, the support you need is from yourself, your loved ones, and any professionals you've enlisted. When your boss knows your Story, they are involved in the ongoing writing of it. They can alter your decision-making based on their reading of the plot and characters. As a huge proponent of introspection and vulnerability, I urge all workers to keep your understanding of yourself as far away from your employer as possible. When people know you as a therapist, they assume you support this Brene Brown-centric movement of prioritizing connection, and people are surprised by resistance to it. But having a class conscious analysis means that I don't see employer-employee relationships as neutral and mutual. Even if you're not explicitly storytelling, letting your boss in on your self-concept benefits them the most. Don't give them more than you have to.

I’ll put my worker screed aside for now. What about the storytelling used on you by digital marketers? What does it have to do with our individual psychological worlds? In business, storytelling is embraced as a way to sell you something without looking like they’re only interested in trying to sell you something. There is what is obviously being stated, and there is something else going on that is not explicit, but concealed. Okay yes- this company is trying to sell me pants, but the story it’s telling is about the aspirational status of the kind of people who buy the pants. Back to therapy world. Explicit content is what we’re all aware of: what is conscious and spoken. You tell me about an inconvenience today that prompted a surprising emotional response. The implicit content is present in you looking at the ground, your voice a touch lower, joking that you can’t do anything right after speaking to a tiny meaningless error. It’s the murkier, unsaid and unsayable part.

Explicit: “I am an independent person. I love that I can provide for my own needs.”

The Possible Implicit: “Asking others for help is a failure. I had to learn to depend on myself because I was let down by so many people who failed to care about me.”

Part of my job is to identify why something stays unsayable and increase your capacity to bring it into consciousness and understand it. Consider what implicit significance might be present in your otherwise, explicitly empowering story. Are you sure that you know what you’re consistently telling yourself? Are you willing to embrace the explicit and implicit content? Is it worth it?

So, there’s the restrictiveness of the beliefs themselves, but the function of storytelling has other disadvantages. We’re told that storytelling connects us to others, but the act of creating and demonstrating our stories pulls us more into our own heads and gets us caught up in the past. In group therapy, storytelling is a derailment of group process. In process groups, members and facilitators work to stay in the here-and-now. If someone veers into the there-and-then by telling a story, a facilitator might say something like "what comes up for you now as you remember what happened?” to turn the focus back to the room. They might ask what it is exactly they want the group to know about them according to their story and why they want them to know it. Story isn’t just self-limiting when it’s brought to a group. Storytelling has the power to move a group away from the key therapeutic processes, such as interpersonal learning and corrective recapitulation of the family of origin. The present moment is the only context in which these therapeutic processes can occur. Zooming out, it’s the only place two or more people can truly connect. Our stories are fundamentally private, even when they are spoken. We can never truly “share our stories”, we can only share about them. We are alone in the narratives we foster.

I want you to consider the stories you tell yourself. Start with the obvious ones and attempt to notice the small ones throughout your day. At the end of this article, I’ll list a bunch of examples to get you started. It takes practice to notice them and it takes even more practice to not treat them as rules, which I would like you to do next. Start with one you’re already aware of. Write it down. Don’t attempt to get rid of your story, you’ll just end up fighting with it more. Let it exist, and notice what behavior it prompts. Under this belief, write down all the things you do based on the story: things you say and things you don’t, where you go and where you don’t, what possibilities this belief offers. For example, if you’re “a bad driver”, does that reinforce more reckless choices, or does it encourage you to take the passenger seat when you and your partner go anywhere? Consider what this belief disallows, how it boxes you in. If you buy into it 100%, what possibilities does this story limit you from? Even if you don’t necessarily want those things, what is off the table if you honor this story to its highest degree? Now stop- are you trying to come up with the opposite or alternative story? Remember it’s not about a belief being positive or negative. I don’t want you to try and come up with reasons why you’re actually a good driver.

I want you to step into the moment in front of you with all of your senses and let the story play through. Let yourself practice the things that are impossible according to the story if it helps you accomplish your goals or live in greater alignment with your values. If you’re feeling disconnected in the presence of loved ones, do what you can to drop the narrative and focus on the ever-changing moment in front of you.

Little self-stories, for example:

I am uncoordinated.

Me and my partner are homebodies, we don’t go out.

I’m stubborn, just like my mother.

I am unique.

That “failure” was actually a learning opportunity. Now, I know I can do a better job by putting my own needs first.

I’m a truth teller who doesn’t mind being honest even if it makes me unpopular.

I’m too anxious for that kind of thing.

I don’t let people disrespect me.

I am stronger for surviving the tragedy I experienced.

I have the power to change my life.

My teachers underestimated me through high school. You should have seen my grades. But now, graduating from law school, I proved to myself and everyone else that I am smart and successful.

Little self-as-context and mindfulness strategies to connect to the present moment and detach from a story:

• As you take a your next bite of food, notice as much as you can about the texture and taste. Notice as many flavors as you can. Is the texture even throughout? What is the temperature like?

• If you’re feeling disconnected (I call it “floaty”) when you’re with a loved and you’re able to talk with them about it, try taking a minute to breathe together, lining up your inhales and exhales. Extra credit: roll or kick a ball (or whatever you have on hand) while you talk. Rhythm helps.

• When you catch yourself saying anything that begins with “I’m the kind of person who”, pause and consider whatever is coming next as simply a thought.

• Remember all of the roles you used to embody that you’ve since moved on from. Imagine one day holding your current narrative as loosely as you do your past roles. (ex: I am a student, I can’t drive, I am happier single).

• Notice at least one thing you can taste, smell, feel (through touch), hear, and see. Imagine observing these like you’re in the audience of a play or concert and they’re the performers on stage.

1. This is a Buddhist concept. I feel like it’s important to name that one.

2. Or “clean pain” and “dirty pain”, which I think is cooler.

3. Okay, they do know about my cats and they see them walking across my screen. I think talking about your pets instead of your partner is actually a good way to dodge a too -personal question.