How our life stories impact our reality

A life story is a running narrative that impacts the present by filtering perceptions, highlighting certain sensory impressions and subordinating others. But a life story does more than influence our perception of the present. A life story also reshapes our memory of the past and our anticipation of the future.

Why we need a life story
We use this running narrative to place any single live event within the flux of an entire lifetime of events. We use it to decide what that individual event means—what it means about who we are, how we relate to others and what life holds in store for us. Without an ongoing narrative, each event would be spliced up and floating, sans context, in a meaningless sea of other bits and pieces.

Life stories come from the left hemisphere
New brain research can now show us (through fMRI scans, stroke victim research and split-brain re-search) that it is the left hemisphere of the brain that is the storyteller. The left hemisphere wants to string things together into a linear pattern, while the right hemisphere tries to observe the whole at once. In other words, our life story considers a distorted portion of our external reality, and is not built around some true representation of “the way things are.”

The way things are
In their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. This theory, later extrapolated as social constructivism, can help us understand socially what brain research shows neurologically. Objective reality is a slippery slope, and what we see, think and feel is a construction of pieces rather than a given whole.

We have to believe it to see it
We have all heard the expression, “I’ll have to see it to believe it.” In large measure, the opposite is true. We have to believe something is possible before we can see its manifestation in the world around us. As Paul Simon said, “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.” This is a literal description of how our eyes see. Our eyes take in sensory impressions, but from perceiving to seeing, the information our eyes relay is translated into “mental inventions.” The neurons in our brains respond to these mental inventions, and only after this translation has occurred does the image become conscious. Our underlying beliefs about what we’re seeing, based upon our interpretations of past experience, factor into the mental invention stage of seeing before we are even conscious that we are seeing anything at all. Basically, we don’t get a conscious say in what we decide to see. Vision is automatic, yes, but it’s also constructed—each and every glimpse.

Do you see the smiley face in the photo of the moon and stars or in the plant photo at the beginning of this post? Your ability to form mental categories is what allows you to think of it as a smiley face. In the same way you see a smiley face when there is no face at all, you also see representations of bits of your life story everywhere you go and in every interaction you have.

The life story’s greatest gift
A life story bestows a hugely important gift on each of us. It gives us a sense of self. We use our running narratives to perceive things as happening to a single consciousness. No story line, no sense of self. But stories of all kinds are by nature limiting. By placing a frame around our perceptions, they keep some in and others out. That’s why careful examination of the tone, themes, and buried beliefs in our life stories has rare value. I teach a life stories class for the University of Utah’s Lifelong Learning program that steps participants through this discovery process and would like to open up a similar online exploration. If you are interested in meeting with an group to explore your life story, please feel free to contact me at Sharon@newinkcopy.com.

Meet your monster

Story archetypes:
1. Overcoming the monster (this post)
2. Rags to Riches (April 30th post)
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

The monster’s jaws open wide; the throat is a hideous cavern of slime. Claws grip you, squeezing out your life force, shoving you toward the cavernous opening. It seems hopeless. The monster is huge, his strength otherworldly, his defenses impenetrable. He might be part human and part animal, or a cross of animals, or a supernatural being. Sometimes the monster is fully human, but even in those cases, he is deformed in some way, representing a darkened, maimed, warped, or demented version of humanity.
No matter what the monster looks like, his threat remains the same—to snuff the life out of something dear to you. In mythic tales, he was the dragon swooping down to threaten the entire village. Later, he became a supernatural villain (as in Dracula) or, with the advent of science fiction, H.G. Well’s host of Martians or Sigourney Weaver’s Alien. Now this dark force swoops down and threatens something equally previous.

What makes a modern-day monster?
As cosmic as the battle is between the light hero and the dark threat, modern day monsters can assume a surprising range of guises. Political monsters include Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and recently, Sadam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. These humans are depicted as dark, lacking humanity, and a threat to life as we know it. Another interesting modern monster is a disease (breast cancer) or the aggregation of a destructive human behavior (rampant consumerism). For example, in the same way mythic monsters swept across the globe devouring victims, middle-class consumerism now poses a monstrous threat to the victimized environment. It reminds me of the old Blob movies, in which the seemingly innocuous blob (a single person’s purchase or inappropriate disposal of garbage) grows in size with every victim it consumes, spreading its potential for devastation and becoming more threatening as it grows.

Although these modern monsters may seem far removed from Beowulf’s Grendel, modern-day heros must answer the same call. They must find the monster’s fatal flaw, a weak spot (often the monster’s sense of his own omnipotence and/or importance) and use that insight to wield a fatal blow. Shai Agassi, founder of A Better Place (about to launch the largest electric car infrastructure ever imagined), seems to be a modern-day hero striking such a blow. His monster? The collective behavior of car-driving humans whose gas-guzzling cars are adding to carbon emissions at a rate that threatens life as we know it on the planet. His insight? This collective human monster’s fatal flaw is its need for (should I say loyalty to) convenience and savings. By devising a way to offer drivers all over the world cheaper, more convenient electric cars, Agassi is posed to drive a knife deep into the monstrous side of increasing carbon-emissions. Will he succeed? It remains to be seen, but he’s definitely got a powerful weapon in his arsenal. We can only imagine the monster’s surprise when he fingers his mortal wound, and realizes it was inflicted through Agassi’s ability to turn convenience and savings into a mighty weapon.

What a monster is not
It’s tempting to see personal affronts and blockages as monsters. The boss who ignores your best efforts or who demeans you may seem monstrous. The boyfriend or girlfriend who dumps you may feel likewise dark and devoid of heart. But the key to the “Overcoming the Monster” tale is that the monster threatens more than your personal ego. Only so can the killing of the monster bring with it the secured promise of future life. If killing the monster is purely personal, and the task is undergone for personal ego gratification, the battle will not evoke transformation in the hero. Rather, the hero may becomes a new incarnation of the monster, even more destructive and terrible than the previous incarnation.

In search of a monster
It’s no wonder then that human beings search high and low for a cause, something greater than themselves that they can believe in, fight for and defend. No cause means no monster, and hence, no “salvation.” This salvation is known in psychological terms as the transformation of the ego, the development of a self-centered, pleasure-seeker into a mature individual who lives a moral, virtuous life. Such a transformation demands a cause, a monster to fight. In fact, the real toughie can be finding an appropriate monster, one whose destructive powers are threatening something that truly matters to you. You may have already found your monster. It may be an illness threatening someone you love. It may be an addictive behavior. It may be a selfish human failing. It may be a political tyrant. If you’ve found your monster, count yourself lucky, and head for the armory to prepare yourself for battle. If you haven’t yet found your monster, well, that means you’re beginning one of the darkest quests yet, a journey into the realm of meaninglessness, anarchy, and chaos. And you’re going to need a few magic aids to make your way through… so keep reading.