Column: When Does a Story Become a Cage?

and what to do about it...

Installment #1 of the Wondering (and Wandering Column). Read more here about my intentions behind this column. This one’s for the paid subscribers—thank you for your questions! I picked this question and another bonus ‘fun’ question at the end about my daughter Bo’s name.

QUESTION: I am a big believer in the power of stories to heal us. I've experienced it in my own life, and witnessed it countless times with others throughout my personal and professional life. But I also know how the healing power of a story--especially of trauma, illness, suffering, betrayal--sometimes reaches an expiration point. It feels like there is a window of time in which it is deeply liberating to name and build a story around something in your life, and then upon too much repetition, it can become another cage people live inside of, keeping them stuck from moving on, evolving, acknowledging their multitudes. How do you know when a story has become a cage instead of a source of liberation, and how do you work with that when you do notice it?

Dear Sweet Exploratory Reader,

You named it so well—the expiration point and the window of time. I want to start with a story. Some of you might recognize yourself in it.

I was working with an intimate group. One Gen Z woman started to share with great enthusiasm about about her recent diagnosis of ADHD, and then her friend’s newly minted Bipolar + Disability status, and her other friend’s finally discovered Lyme disease, followed by a family member’s recent ah-ha discovery of early childhood sexual abuse. I listened and asked what it meant to her to be able to name these things: “We finally have a reason for why we’ve been feeling how we feel. It’s a relief.” She was adamant that previous generations had never had the option to name in this way. Now her generation, at least for those with access and support, did and they would.

The first move with story is always yes. This is the stage of relief. It is a liberation to name “the thing” and give it air. It empowers you; it educates people around you; you might even take up the cause and wear the flag. We need that in our world. It invites us all to the seat of broader cultural awareness. At some point, though, that same exact story and the identity you’ve crafted around it can becomes a box, a limitation, a sticky film entrapping your own evolution.

Unless…

Okay, let’s travel together.

Check out some language changes I’ve made over the years:

from Storyteller to Story-maker to Story Mammal

The commonly-used word storyteller serves a purpose if we are passing down someone else’s or a collective story. But, for personal narrative, storyteller is a “lite” and flimsy definition of what is actually happening because we aren't telling a story that simply appeared. We made that story—by stringing together the raw material of facts in a particular way. We also didn’t only make it with our mind; we mammaled it into being with our animal body.

Over the last 15 years of working with people and story (and living my own stories), I’ve witnessed a general wave of stages and grouped them into four R’s.

Conclusion: We want a fluid story. That leads to choice.

So, how do we get there?

Before you read them, pick one of your stories to accompany you as you read this column. Maybe it’s a traumatic event, life experience, diagnosis, life pattern, habit, or core belief you’ve held about yourself. Give it a title, for example: “The Car Accident” “My Life As The Betrayed One” or “The Injury That Changed Everything” or “The Little Brother Who Never Measured Up” or “My Alcohol Addiction” or “A Child of ___x____ (Social Group).”

RIGHT. As I wrote above, it is absolutely right to share your story however it first emerges. In fact, I believe its initial incarnation is a survival mechanism. Your nervous system creates the first verbal story. You have an experience and your physiology notices what it notices, highlights what it needs to, ignores what it can’t tolerate yet, and then tells it in such a way that will support your aliveness. It might be an “I’m okay, I made it” story so that you can bolster yourself; it might be an “I am not okay” so that others come to your support. Why can five or 500 people can have the same exact experience and tell it differently? Because we organize facts based on our own cosmology and nervous system wiring and context. Do you see the potential for self-compassion here? I always say the FIRST STEP to shifting a story is turning toward it to say, Thank you, thank you sad story for keeping me alive. Does that sound counter-intuitive? Read on. The reckoning section below will clear it up. All of your stories gave you that first CPR breath. So, whatever habit or way of being you don’t like about yourself—well, it was purely adaptive at first. It kept you on the planet.

READINESS. We know that readiness is the key to the freedom door. You can’t do anything until you are self-initiated into being ready. For months or years (the window of time varies person to person), you might tell the same story over and over again. Same words, intonations, volume, rhythm, pace, until… you start to tire of it yourself. I call that moment The Internal Nudge. You feel stuck. You might hear victim language over-taking you. You are bored with yourself and your own words about it aloud. The +/- charge is fading. Your people’s eyes glaze over when you talk about this story. The story no longer feels fresh; it’s actually festering and might even be hurting you and the folks around you more than it is helping. The story has completed its job and is done. It has gone from being adaptive to maladaptive—and you are now aware of that change. You might start to seek help: therapy, a class, etc. I don’t believe we can start to orient differently to the story until this point. It’s a magical moment. It’s the place where possibility and mystery start to float in on the wind. It can also be super uncomfortable. What happens if the story shifts? Fear shows up because are you actually willing to relate differently to it, to let it go as it has been? It’s been a reliable steed up to this point.

RECKONING. Welcome to the resistance place. It’s the last climb to the summit. You are huffing and puffing and wishing you didn’t have to do this part because it’s so much easier to be in what is familiar. We humans love a known quantity. Even if it’s painful or un-safe, it can registers as safe-feeling—that is why we stay stuck. The unknown, after all, is inherently scary. Yet that is where the fluidity lies. Let’s reckon. How have you been benefiting from this story, even if it’s the saddest story on earth? I know that question seems strange, or off-putting, but remember that we take an experience and make the story to help us survive. Your hard/sad/devastating/triumph story helped you survive. It has likely given you attention, status, belonging, an excuse or reason, permission, access to emotions, specialness, a sense of power or accomplishment or many other lovely things. Make a list of all it has given you. If you are willing to detangle from the story, do you have other supports in place? Can you find other ways to source those lovely things if you still need them? The above path is a solid way over the mountain. For me and others I work with, the reckoning is most surprising and fruitful place.

RELATIONALLY. Once you are in a reckoning process, it’s time to play. We are social animals and we need each other. Our wounds are usually relational and so our healing wants to happen relationally too. I’m a big proponent of socializing your emerging story as a way to gain more insight and wisely use the magnifying powers of a communal field. When you start creating more fluidity with your story, it’s important to update your people and to ask them to uphold the new frequency about you with you. It matters because our stories exist in the relational fabric. But not everyone gets to hear your story. Choose mindfully. Go slowly and titrate what and how you share (in small doses). That will give it more traction and sustainability in actually “taking” as believable for you and those around you.

A way to play:

• I like the analogy of a theater. Erasure is never the directive. We aren’t forgetting history or blotting anything out. Instead, it’s about positions. Some parts of your story have been front stage while others have hung out side stage or hidden in the closet backstage. What happens if you move them around? What if you foreground something that has been hidden? What if you give the shining star a chance to chill out in the shadowy wings with a bottle of water and a comfy chair?

• With this new positionality, try telling the same story 5 radically different ways to your trusted people. Play with tone, volume, language, intent, pace and what you highlight versus what you don’t. Give each version a different title. Let it be an experiment.

• As you do so, track yourself. What do you feel like as you share this version? What sensations do you notice in your body? What feels full? Where do you sense your own outline? Where do you float away? Where does your body have buy in to the process? That bottom-up piece is essential.

• At night, re-imagine yourself telling the new story and/or embodying it as a reality. It doesn’t have to be grand or epic. It can be a 5-10% shift in the story. Those little noticing over time add up. It’s essential to make this an embodied imagination and not only visualize but notice the sensations and felt-sense within as you visualize.

• Remember you always have choice. No one is forcing you to evolve your story. You can go back to how it was anytime you like. Often that permission is all we need to never actually go back to how it was.

• The trickiest part: Slowly building capacity for some others to be uncomfortable with your evolving story. Maybe they benefit from you being the same-old. Maybe they are threatened by your change. You can’t change how they feel but you can grow your own okayness with their not-okayness. And, please know that many will be in such deep support of your evolution that they start rapidly evolving themselves. Make them your steady companions. The ripple effect is real.

All ecosystems, from the micro to the macro, benefit from diversity. Our stories want fluidity and possibility. The more you inhabit your own fluidity, the more you start creating a culture of story fluidity around you. No more cages. Only flowers growing and blooming and dying and growing and blooming again. Tip: You can always self-redirect and edit in the middle of a sentence when talking with someone. I do it all the time. Out loud.

My last point: You aren’t your story! You are in relationship to/with your story. That relationship, like all relationships, can change and grow and deepen and become more hearty and nourishing.

Apply all of the above to community stories as well. There is so much more to say and sometimes it’s better to offer up the 20% so that 80% of it is absorbed. That is also a nervous system truth—too much information can cloud a person and shut down their ability to receive.

As you wrote above, dear reader, “acknowledging our multitudes” is the gold. Story is benevolent in its essence. It wants us to play.

Love,

Bonus question: Where does the name Bo Neve come from?

Bo is our second-born. Neve, as a name, was on my short list for both kids. It’s of Latin and Irish origin and means “snow.” I loved the sound of it and Bo was born the day before winter solstice on a very snowy day. Snow is a huge part of our lives in Montana and, having grown up mostly in the tropics, I had to make friends with it. My husband Chris wasn’t sold on Neve as a first name. I stayed open. A month before she was born, something/one unseen whispered into my ear that the baby inside me was female (we didn’t find out ahead of time) and her name was Bo Neve. I immediately called my cousin and told her. I had long been curious about a gender-neutral name given that our first-born Eula has such a classically feminine name. The name Bo originates from Scandinavia (Chris’ people) and means “to live/dwell.” I wanted to put both names together because we do so much dwelling in the snow here, plus the presence of snow itself on a global scale feels like it will be an important part of the future for all children. After she was born and still nameless, we were cozied up near the wood stove and Chris was rocking her when I finally suggested the idea of Bo Neve. His whole body vibrated yes. It was a very tender moment. She now goes by both “Bo” and “Bo Neve” depending on where she is and what mood she’s in. She continually tells me how much she loves her name.