Your Brain: Storyteller
Posted on October 27, 2024 by Todd Leonard, One of Thousands of Spirituality Coaches on Noomii.
Learning the storieis our brains tell us about ourselves and others empowers us to rewrite them to be more accurate and more gracious.
Do you realize how accurate it is to say that we write our own stories? It’s more true than we might realize.
One of the major insights of my year of clinical pastoral education (CPE) was that our brains author a version of our life experiences that we accept as fact, whether that version is objectively factual or not. And the way we think, behave and feel all flow out of our brain’s story. Even our DNA, according to the theory of epigenetics, can be changed by our brain’s story.
So what if crucial parts of our stories are factually wrong, but are informed by family, religion, or trauma? We have to do the work of going back to those times and places where our brains got the story wrong and spend time writing over the content. That’s therapeutic work.
But have you ever stopped to consider the stories that your brain has written about other people? Is it possible that your narrative is based on half-truths, stereotypes, assumptions and cultural prejudice? What about people voting for the opposite candidate for president than you? You’ve written up a pretty solid narrative of who “those” people are, right? Has your brain gotten it right? Or are you as misinformed about parts of them as you are about parts of your own story?
In this case, the therapy is not done with a counselor, it’s done over coffee, or a beer, or a sandwich. You sit down with the person you know everything about and you actually let them tell you their story and you tell them yours. And then maybe, somewhere between two somewhat-true autobiographies, something closer to the real story emerges and we find out it’s better than the original.
