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All of us have things we struggle with in life. For some of us, we might have particular areas that seem to always be causing us trouble. Maybe, try as we might, we find ourselves in one bad relationship after another and it feels nearly impossible to break the cycle. Or maybe our relationships are healthy, but in our professional or academic life, we find we are always struggling.
When these struggles happen it is only natural that our brain wants to make sense of our experiences and we start to make generalizations about ourselves, and life in general. How many times have you heard someone say some variation of, “It’s just impossible to find a good man/woman/partner in this city/nowadays/because of social media” or “School/work isn’t fair, all the teachers/bosses/coworkers are out to fail me/lay me off anyways.” You might not struggle with these specific examples, but maybe this sounds familiar because you’ve made sense of your life this way recently or in the past?
Making these sorts of generalizing complaints seems rather harmless and oftentimes it might just be a way to blow off steam and commiserate. That’s fair. However, in our private moments and with the compounding effect of time and stress these generalizations often go to a darker place and turn inward. “I am unlovable,” “I am destined to be unsuccessful,” “There’s something wrong with me,” or “I just let people walk all over me.”
Woah. These types of negative narratives can cause serious damage and hold us back. Like a poison cure that we unknowingly put into our system, our own narratives that we weave to make sense of our struggles can become toxic self-fulfilling prophecies. The more we believe in these stories, the weaker they make us, thus playing into a feedback loop where we believe these negative thoughts about ourselves even more! It often happens that we forget that we were the ones who came up with these negative narratives in the first place and the stories become part of “the facts of life.”
There’s good news though. Although our thoughts can often go to a black-and-white place (lovable or unlovable, success or failure, alone forever or happily ever after) our lives are rarely this black-and-white. In therapy, we not only parse out the stories you’ve been telling yourself, but we also look for the exceptions to the seemingly overwhelming problems these stories try to encapsulate.
Let’s look at some examples. Say you are struggling with always selling yourself short in your career. You never ask for a raise and always seem to choose the wrong job for yourself. Are there any other areas in your life where you have a discerning eye, don’t take no for an answer, and enter negotiations with confidence? This can be as small as interacting with customer service when making a return! Or maybe you are really struggling with procrastinating on your assignments, saving your work to the last minute to disastrous results. Where in your life are you organized, focused, confident, and motivated? The answer may lie in how you approach your hobbies. There are usually always a few places in our lives where we break our own rules.
These counterexamples to our black-and-white negative stories hold a wealth of wisdom in them. What makes these situations different? How do you feel when you are living and working in the exception? How do you approach these situations differently? What skills are you using when you are in the exception? How do you see yourself then? Can you use some of the same skills and approaches you use during the exception when you are now working through the problem?
The important thing to note here is that you don’t have to start from scratch. If you are alive and especially if you are doing something so positive for yourself like coming to therapy or reading a therapy blog post then your problem isn’t happening ALL the time. Together, we can not only identify what your negative narratives are and where they might have originated, we can also look for the solutions to the problems these narratives try to describe. The solutions are often hidden in plain sight, they are right there in what is already working.
