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CYNTHIA ARMSTRONG

The Power of the Stories We Tell Ourselves

By Cynthia Armstrong

Today I want to talk about something very subtle in our minds sometimes and sometimes not. That is the stories we tell ourselves perhaps the stories we tell ourselves aren't the subtle part. However, the meaning we give them and the control we offer accounts are, and I'm going to talk about us as parents right now, but please remember that as you apply it to yourself and then it allows you to see how that applies to your children and how that can give you the power to help them.

So stories are how we make meaning out of things. Stories are a part of our brain that helps us to determine what happened. If children fall, they might look around and see something that's why they fall or that thing that's unsafe, and it might have absolutely nothing to do with why they failed. But they'll make that connection and continue looking for confirmation of that. We've done that as children before we could think about thinking, we've told ourselves stories about why things happened, and then we take that and interpret the next thing with it. So when we tell ourselves, stories often put other people and us in a role like a character. You're going to be the hero or the protagonist or the antagonist, and we put ourselves, and we put other people in these roles, and so when we say people will be in the victim role or the victim mode, then really they're telling themselves a story that puts them there.

When we tell stories where we might be in that victim mode, we give away our power to somebody else. And yet we gave our power to them. And yet we will blame them for this situation that we're in, and that disempowers us, which is why we are in that victim mode. So we could even tell ourselves stories where we're the hero. Oh, so and so's, you know, struggling with their parents, roommates, or whatever. And we're going to go in and rescue them. So that we can be that hero. We're not helping them or creating a place where they feel empowered to notice their situation and notice what they're capable of doing in that situation, whether it's, you know, this is not a situation I choose to be in. I'm going to leave, or you know, whatever it is.

When we play that hero part, we don't give other people the opportunity to learn, grow, or become self-aware. And so, but, you know, we go in, and we rescue, and we're that hero. And in parenting, there are all kinds. There's an infinite number of names for different parenting styles from all over the world. But, like, if you're a helicopter parent, right? That's apparent that takes on that hero role where I have to come in and save my child; I have rescued my child. And in essence, we take that ability to learn and to become away from them and take that on ourselves.

And here's a funny thing. When we take the hero role, we often define our children, those roommates, or whomever we're rescuing; those are the victims because they need to be saved. So they're victims. But then when we're the villain, We put the people in that same victim mode, so whether we're the hero or whether we're being the villain, We will put other people in that victim. It's interesting when you think about it and things like that because we don't usually define ourselves as the village hero. That's something for other people, but the villain and a hero role will do that same thing. There are times when people put themselves in that villain role, and that's when they say, this is just the way I am where I can't help myself or and they disempower themselves. They're the villains not by choice, but just because of how they are or the situation they grew up in, they'll find a reason to be the villain.

But most often, I think we create that villain part for somebody else because usually we see the good in ourselves and the reason while we're doing it. So, in storytelling, we create all of these roles. However, those roles, those characters that we take on, they kind of define, they become the reason we feel the way we think, so if we're feeling something that we don't like, that's negative, that's powerless, any of those things that that we don't want to hang out in very often, then really we can go. We can see the story I'm telling myself when we start thinking of it that way as a story. This situation isn't the way I perceive it to be. There's another way I perceive this will lead to hanging the feelings I prefer to hang out in. So even if you know my house would burn down, right? That's something. That isn't something I can't just say. Oh, I perceive that my house isn't burnt down. But I can tell stories about it.

That can help empower me or help me to be the victim. So I could say, oh, the firefighters didn't get here. Soon enough, the fire started because so and so left the battery charger on. Too long, and I can go into blame mode, victim mode or I can go into stories that benefit me, like, wow, this is going to be a real challenge for me. I've lost my baby photos from my children and my childhood, my family. I can be aware and not minimize the fact that, wow, my house burnt down. This is an adjustment for me. There are things that you know my life is going to be changed because of this event, but I can then look for changes like I wonder whom I'm going to meet because of this. I wonder how much empathy I'll have for others in this situation now and I can wonder and put out a story that even though this is hard because in any good story. There's that challenge, and there's that hard part, something to overcome.

Stories without that are pretty boring. You wouldn't want to read it. You wouldn't want to watch it as a TV show or movie. And so when we can accept that, you know this is my hero. I may not be my hero, my character. Time to step up to this challenge, and I get to decide. How do I react to this challenge?

The lights make my eyes water today, but we have that power. And when we take that power back, like when we notice how those things we're doing give us power or take it away from us. Then we can help our children see that as well in how we talk about the things we experience and how we can speak to them about the things they're experiencing.

Children are great by their very nature, and our privilege and responsibility are to raise them.

It is a responsibility and a challenge to raise great kids, and we are here to help you along that journey to make it as enjoyable, fun, and fulfilling as possible.