Stop telling tales of your past heroics and live a narrative-free life (8 min read)

We all have our personal stories that we love to tell others. Our stories are a direct route to our personality, offering the recipient a snapshot of who we are, like the time you accidentally went on a blind date with a dentist or when you put your foot in it in front of your in-laws (just me?)

It can be something we rely on to fill awkward silences, and it is a form of openness which can be refreshing and can serve to break the ice early on in a new relationship, whether it be platonic or romantic.

However, the flip side of this is that, not only will your stories be overwhelming if you tell them too early, you might also become overly reliant on these stories in such a way that they become a mask for your true personality. In this scenario, there is likely to be a deeper insecurity that you are hiding. Although we can trick our brains in the moment, this insecurity will likely be felt by the listener, resulting in further unintended consequences.

“A man is always a teller of tales” wrote the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel Nausea, “he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story”. [1]

In other words, it is as if he is taking a back-seat in his own life and moulding himself with pre-woven tales in which he features. The issue with these narratives, in Sartre’s words, is that this ultimately holds us back, limiting our thinking with an overly simplistic outlook and inhibiting our ability grow freely.

Stories also give us the illusion that the world is ordered, logical and difficult to change which diminishes the real complexity of life. In some cases, our stories can become dangerous when they persuade us of a false and harmful world view.

In this article, I will discuss the risks of storytelling and how telling the same stories can box you into a rigid and oversimplified state. I will also offer potential prompts you can use to snap yourself out of these rigid narrative loops.

After outlining the risks, I will then be able to move onto why adopting a perspective-based attitude is the preferable choice.

Danger #1: Stories keep us locked in the past

Stories can lock us into ways of acting, thinking and feeling. When we rehash a story we have already told, we are reopening an old narrative and transporting ourselves to an outdated version of ourselves. If we tell a story repeatedly, it has the power to return us to our old patterns of behaviour.

For example, say you used to have a car and you were involved in a crash that was your fault. If you are not a confident driver and it has been years since you have driven, telling this story over and over again will solidify your self-perception that you are a danger on the road which, in turn, will make it harder for you to overcome your anxieties about driving.

In this sense, your self-belief is stunted by rehashing your past.  

Danger #2: Your stories are an oversimplified account of a complicated picture

When we tell a story about a previous situation, it is often a selective account, omitting details that we deem less important. Details which, naturally, exclude other perspectives because we can only present our version of events. We will always oversimplify the event when telling a story and gloss over the nuances in favour of a plot that solidifies us as the main character.

Seeing yourself as the main character in your story is a narrow perspective.

Think of the way in which people talk about their ‘journey’ through life. Through this narrative, certain events become more significant while others are overlooked, and random events can be reframed as being part of some grand plan.

However, viewing our lives in such a narrow way hinders our ability to understand the complex behaviour of others and ourselves.

For example, a child that accepts the narrative of being ‘naughty’ may incorrectly frame their behaviour as bad, rather than as an expression of their unmet needs. If the child is not told it is bad, this framing will not exist and, therefore, they will only see their behaviour as a way to express themselves.

Say the child is with their family in a restaurant and they have the urge to stand up on the table. Without the parents stepping in and telling them it is not acceptable in a public setting; they will have no conception that this is bad.

The reason I mention this is to show how our lives are made up of narratives that are arbitrarily framed as acceptable and unacceptable.

Once we realise this, we can begin to question which narratives we are holding onto for the wrong reasons, and only then can we offer an alternative narrative which is closer to the reality of the situation.

In the 1970s, ‘narrative therapy’ became a practical method for therapists, who realised the untapped potential that forming new narratives could give the individual. Provided these new narratives are more honest than their original accounts of the facts, they can serve as breakthroughs, particularly for someone who struggles to comprehend the reasons as to why some events occurred. If these new narratives avoid the pitfalls which our selective memory leads us to, erasing the truths which we would want to forget, it can get us onto a new track, one which aligns more with the reality.

The Elephant in the Room

However, the issue with this therapy is that we will never be able to take our subjectivity out of the equation fully and limiting yourself two one narrative will inevitably lead to a form of tunnel vision

In other words, when we swap one narrative for another, although it may be an improvement, the singular nature will still be there with the new narrative, ultimately making it a simplistic and exclusionary approach.

In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, he describes how a cafe waiter in his “day-to-day movements, a particular narrative is embedded into them that shapes his identity and actions.” [2]

Within these constraints, Sartre would say you are operating on bad faith, in that you are living without being aware of your responsibility or in control of your destiny.

In his words:

All [the waiter’s] behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us. [3]

“There is nothing there to surprise us” because it’s a narrative that we all know, his narrative is a ‘waiter in cafe’ and nothing outside of this narrative seeps through. To a patron, he has no other narrative.

This shows that the waiter is not free because he is tied to that narrative within the realms of the café. In Sartre’s words, the “narrative he follows gives him a limited understanding of himself, determining his actions and preventing him from taking ownership of his life.” [4]

It follows, then, that if the waiter scrapped that narrative, his freedom would increase, and he would move closer to self-hood and regaining his autonomy.

Of course, scrapping a work-based narrative is not ideal if you are wanting to keep hold of your job. Above all else, the workplace values keeping up appearances so that the professional environment can be maintained both for the client and the workers.

The more realistic place that this can be implemented is in our private lives so we can see which narratives are restricting our personal freedom and hindering our own development.

If you suspect this, two prompts you can ask is:

What narrative am I currently holding onto?

Is it serving me or am I serving it?

If you realise that you are relying on a story too much, it is possible that you are using it to quell an unmet need. Something is lacking and in your crisis of identity, you are looking to the past to fix your present inadequacy.

If this exercise fails to produce any meaningful insights, fortunately, there is another solution. You could do away with all narratives and live a narrative-free life.

How to live a narrative-free life

Being narrative free means rejecting a particular identity, and instead seeing life and meaning as a set of open choices which are fluid and unstuck.

For the waiter, rejecting his narrative identity would mean acting in a way that reflects his choices and sense of self, not just the story he tells about himself.

To get to this narrative-free state, there are a few things that must be realised first:

·       Your narratives don’t exist outside of your mind

·       The stories you tell yourself don’t have to be out there in the world

·       Stories are tools you use to help you manage the external world

·       Stories relate to facts and real events but your subjective perspective mean they are not necessarily factual - they’re a finger pointing to the moon

·       Stories help us make sense of things, so we can’t reject them completely

Once you realise these truths, you can start to move away from your rigid narratives about yourself and adopt fluid perspectives instead.

Adopt perspectives, not narratives

A perspective isn’t just a point of view, it’s a way you engage with the world from a particular position.

Perspectives are shaped by our place in the world; our beliefs, values and what we think are the basis of our perspectives.

It is your perspectives which generate your narratives. This means that we have a say in what narratives we let in before they have the chance to shape our identity.

The reason perspectives are better than narratives is in their fluidity; they don’t have a linear and ordered structure and they’re not a sequence of events. Once we refine our perspectives, we can shift away from rehashing the same story over and over, and grow past our heroic tales in favour of producing new ones.

Perspectives can be compared to a poem.

Just as the words in a poem capture unique ways of seeing and experiencing the world, so do our perspectives, combining words, thoughts and feelings to convey an image. They give us value, offering us the ability to see different experiences, ones which are missed in our linear narratives.

Understanding ourselves in a non-linear way allows us to see how we relate to a complex and chaotic world in the present moment. Within that moment, we find significance without needing an ordered pattern.

So the key to avoiding narratives and to stop telling stories is:

·      To outline the perspectives fuelling your narratives

·      Understand your perspectives so that the narrative loses its strength

·      Focus on perspectives which will open you up to new possibilities

When we consider new perspectives, we are being open to new information, allowing for improved receptivity. This non-linear approach will keep us on our toes, unstuck, and away from the rigid trappings of our rehearsed narratives.  

To re-tell a quote by the philosopher Kierkegaard, although life can only be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards. [5]

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Thanks for reading!

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Brandon Bartlett

Newel of Knowledge Writer

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Sources:

[1] Sartre Nausea (1938)

[2,3&4] Sartre - Being and Nothingness (1943)

[5] Kierkegaard - Journalen JJ:167 (1843)

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