Being told you’re a horrible piece of trash is unacceptable to the prideful. People are naturally prideful and reject this notion which is why so oft people are found in cognitive dissonance or denial with themselves and in clash with the worlds they create around themselves. A great way around allowing a horrible event in one’s life to define them is to redefine the self.
The self is made of three different parts from a neurological perspective. There is the awareness and perception of things, the actions of the body and immediate happenings and then finally the self which is conceptualized. That last part is malleable at any point as well as was made up in the first place by one’s perceptions and decisions. What narrative therapy does is allow one to tell their story. One’s story must have coherence so that it flows. Loopholes in a story make one a liar and incomplete in their understanding of themselves. One cannot have pride when their story is in shambles.
What rewriting one’s story does is not to edit events in the past, but revisit an event with a different perspective. Deciding you are now a person who does get slapped in the face in the middle of the desert by a crazy girl who is in love with you, allows you to not hate yourself while forcing yourself to create something new with a whole new schema of information. Changing your story is part of living in a world you are not totally in control of, its part of learning. Only when one is totally in control can one deny this. At that point, a person is old and their story is old. When stubbornness wins, the world gets boring.
Always look for new, it can be fun or education or experience but never stop. That is true death for that’s when change ends. To describe your behavior involves describing my behavior as well as the environment, for we have one system. However to see only one way telling the story and one way of continuing the story, is to lie and miss out. Your future is totally free even if your past is connected. Trick is that your past is a story and all stories have a thousand different angles. Each one aims you differently forward. Your story is not permanent and neither are you, believing otherwise is hubris, ego-rific, detrimental to intellect and empathy.
