Ahead of the inaugural meeting of the Mental Fitness Community at 6pm Tuesday 30th January (I really want to call it Psycho (as in psychological not psychopath) Strength & Fitness but wonder if this may sound too aggressive for a community group focused on mental health… let me know your thoughts on the name please!), I want to take this opportunity to formulate my ideas and invite you into them ahead of time as we discuss the power of narrative and how we might be able to use it to improve our psychological strength ,fitness and resilience.
One of the most powerful influences in respect to the quality of our mental landscape is our internal narrative. Our story about ourselves and the world around us.
Take a moment, or two, and consider what does your narrative look like? How does it sound? How does it feel? What does it tell you about your relationship with yourself and the world you live in?
In the age of reason and science we often presume that we are far more rational and reasonable than we actually are. We live our lives through stories and metaphor, we interconnect our lives with those around us with the same cognitive vehicles. Yes, we do normally also make strong use of tangible facts in our relationships with others (such as how many times has this person betrayed my trust? Is this person likely to seek to do me physical harm?) in determining whom we choose to be around and include in our lives, but what is often far more significant than the factual elements of the relationship is the story that we tell ourselves about it. The story we tell ourselves about our relationships will have as powerful an effect, if not even more so, on the durability of our relationships and how they makes us feel. Whether we feel secure and happy in our relationships depends on our shared stories within those relational frameworks as much as it does on the raw data of things such as provision, company, and security.
In this age of reason and science a narrative has emerged that stories are simply so, religion is simply fanciful superstition, an “optiate for the masses”, and that names will never hurt us. Reason is absolute and should be superordinate to our whimsical human emotions and their corresponding narratives. We may be tempted to cast scorn on the naivety of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution whose story telling traditions were a means of creating a shared narrative and the opportunity to pass down wisdom through the ages. We may be tempted to treat these as nothing more than stories overlooking the tremendous power that story holds over us whether we are conscious of it or not. We should consider the gift within the mystery of the metaphor and the models of lives contained therein that we might learn from.
Thinkers and psychotherapists have long argued the significance and the power of our stories in the felt quality of our lives which can be at odds to the actual events. Take for example the account of psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, from his time in the Nazi concentration camps where he observed that the people who felt they had a purpose to live for were more likely to survive the horrors. A sense of purpose is at heart a narrative that guides us. Historian, Yuval Noah Harari, points out to us the significance of the narratives in modern and historical conflicts, he holds that wars are not primarily about resources but about conflicting narratives that will not or cannot reconcile. The work of psychotherapists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung studied the metaphorical patterns hidden in our dream states and our subconscious. Modern therapeutic methods still focus on creating a narrative to build our lives forward from, whether it is the reassembling of a narrative which has been fragmented by trauma or the use of cognitive behavioural methods to question and challenge the narrative we have adopted, “is this true?”. Therapists, philosophers and historians alike all share in the recognition of the significance of our narrative to our wellbeing and the wider wellbeing of society at large.
And narrative stories exist at these cultural and societal levels also and can be a personal challenge as highlighted by Johann Hari in the excellent work, “Lost Connections”. We are inevitably striving to live to the societally imposed standards of others or in other words, we are trying to live by their story of values. This is all socially constructed but it does mean that it isn’t real in a felt, experiential sense. But because it is socially constructed it may afford us the possibility of changing the narrative we hold about ourselves and the narrative we share with others. Western cultural and societal stories have been underpinned by Christianity for the last 2000 years but this has unravelled rapidly since the scientific enlightenment which exploded in the 1800’s and this loss of shared narrative has had a significant impact on our relationship with ourselves and with others. As a consequence of this period German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated the catastrophe of man creating his own narrative devoid of a relationship with god. His works cast an ominous foreshadowing of the horrors of war that tore Europe and the wider world apart in the first half of the 20th Century.
The tragedies of the 20th Century are also a cautionary tale to the danger of the great influence that compelling story tellers hold over us. A great teller of stories can blind us to the errors in the story itself and equally we might miss a great potential due to the poor telling of a supporting narrative. And this is the political minefield we find ourselves in with leaders who are potentially far more charismatic than competent and would be leaders with great skill except in the manner in which they create a narrative vision for others to follow…
And so against this backdrop I come to the the point I want to invite you to reflect on, which is the need to be conscious of our stories and to aspire to understand them. I cannot, would not, and should not, presume to tell you what your story should be, and we should be cautious of people who make the claim to us that they can do so. Perhaps the best story is the one that works for us and brings least harm to those around us? But we should be humble enough to recognise that we are unlikely to be able to tell others, or even force others, to adopt a story of our choosing and that it will make their lives better. Further we need to cognisant that our stories have to coexist in a world with others, our narrative must work at some sort of social level or it will become very challenging for us and those around us.
Mindfulness can help us in this endeavour to recognise and be wiser to the narratives in ourselves and encourage us to be more compassionate and wiser to the narratives of those around us, especially the unconscious ones. If we can recognise our narratives then we might just be in a position to tell a better story and what might that mean for our felt experience and the lives of those we care most about?
If you can please join me in continuing this discussion on Tuesday 30th January at 6pm at Retro Café, Ashley Road, Poole, comment below or send me a message via my website.
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