“Narrative therapists are interested in joining with people to explore the stories they have about their lives and relationships, their effects, their meanings and the context in which they have been formed and authored.”
Alice Morgan from What is Narrative Therapy?
Have you ever felt that you being too hard on yourself? That personal critical judgment has become overwhelming? There are reasons why this happens. From the time we are born, we learn our culture codes through imitation – we copy what we watch and hear. It is ritual observance. We learn from those who learned before – to walk, dress, use good table manners, how socialize in public, settle conflicts, etc.
Our observing practice includes engaging in a ritual of ongoing internalized conversation with ourselves as a way of measuring ourselves against the external world, and trying to determine if we fit in or are acceptable to others. The culture codes we adopt for ourselves represent the rules we use to judge our self worth and who we are as a person. These rules form the stories we live by and inform how we make meaning of the world around us.
Often we are recruited into adopting stories about ourselves where we don’t feel like we quite “measure up”. This can happen when we enter in a new relationship, when our social environment changes, or at a time when we are undergoing personal changes in our own lives. The ritual of practicing internalized conversations combined with adopting marginalizing stories about ourselves, leaves us vulnerable to negative self-judgment; to the point where we can’t see anything but the “flaws” that we use to begin to define who we are.
To overcome these debilitating self-judgments I have found it very useful to understand and challenge how this problem saturated story was manufactured. Secondly, engage in re-remembering practices where you are able to identify preferred ways of being that fit with your authentic voice. Challenge those codes, rules and points of reference that you have been using to judge yourself and return to your preferred way of being.
