Why Do We Have Storylines?
There are different ways to look at the question: why do we tell ourselves stories about events?
We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years into very high-functioning animals. Part of the successful establishment of humans on the earth was the development and honing of our ability to make sense of our environment, to remember the past and project it into the future, to discern and judge. Developing personal myths, legends, descriptions and explanations about our environment is a large part of this: making guesses about why things happened in the past, how we should respond, what will happen in the future, and so on. It is such a habitual aspect of the mind that the skills continue to be applied in all circumstances, whether they add to our quality of life or health, or not.
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There is also a way in which we all feel vulnerable and imperfect, wounded by the unkindnesses and failures of connection in the people who raised us and surrounded us as we grew up. We got the message that it’s not okay to be an imperfect, flawed human being – though we all are. We learned to use our inner narrative to defend ourselves and explain the world in a way that made things feel good, or at least ‘okay’ or tolerable.
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Most of us have a subconscious belief, too, that if we just analyze, worry and control enough, nothing bad will happen. We will somehow be able to avoid the messiness and pain of life. Or, our stories can be about how we should have been able to avoid it, if we’d only tried harder.
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At a more basic level, it can also be seen or experienced that talking to ourselves, explaining and telling stories to ourselves, is a way of distracting ourselves from what we are feeling – particularly feelings that are intense or uncomfortable. When we feel anxiety, shame, guilt, longing, grief…the urge to move away from the raw feeling and into ‘thinking’ is very strong. It can be almost impossible to stay with the raw body energy of a feeling without getting into an inner narrative about what caused it, what you should do about it, and so on.
This can be seen most clearly at times when you are in the grip of spinning or obsessive thoughts. If you ask yourself, “What feeling is behind these thoughts? What feeling is here but too uncomfortable to have in my body?” sometimes you will spontaneously see the fear, longing, or hurt that lies behind your thinking. If you are able to allow the feeling to come in fully, often the thinking will just slow down or disappear. Its mission to distract you from the feeling has ended unsuccessfully…!
