Stories that Shape Us
“The self lies hidden in the shadow he is the keeper of the gate, the guardian of the lies hidden in the threshold. The way to the self lies through him; behind the dark aspect that he represents there stands the aspect of wholeness, and only by making friends with the shadow do we gain the friendship of the self. ”
Story is the way we keep a sense of meaning and continuity in our lives - how we integrate the difficult experiences of our lives and the values we seek to uphold. How we create a sense of coherence around who we are and who we are becoming is an important part of our inner and psychological well-being. Our focus of attention and the questions we ask are often a reflection of the stories we have been participating in - whether consciously or not. Our stories shape us, and how we relate to the world.
“how to encompass in our minds the complexity of some lived moments of life? … You don’t do that with theories. You don’t do that with a system of ideas. You do it with a story”
At times, we have all lived in surrender to stories about our lives. Sometimes the stories we are presented with give us limited options - stories of gender roles or how we are expected to be in the world. Other times we find other people’s stories for us more appealing - we find them inwardly persuasive and we’re somehow compelled to go along with them. We may have had a hand in writing them and we may have inherited them from our family or the people who were important to us when we are young. It takes a hard-won maturity to become a fully responsible and active participant in living your story - or renegotiate a new way of being for yourself.
Most of us have lived long enough, and experienced enough pain and wrong turns to know that you get to write some days and other days someone else is penning your fate. Somewhere in the middle of our revisions and do overs we begin to glimpse a little bit of the grace we need to become a a full participant in co-creating the life you feel like like showing up for.
Learning to integrate the shadow parts of ourselves we lost, or cast out at some earlier point in our journey is a daunting task. We move quickly and often don’t feel we can devote the attention we would like to our inner process. Beginning to grasp at how these very early rejections of parts of ourself framed our stories in ways that have guided our life for many does not seem to fit with the pace and performance demands we experience every day. There is so much that we’ve been accustomed to experiencing at such a rapid rate that many of us have little hope of making grounded sense of it, let alone make our peace.
Real loss - at any age or stage can thrust us into a new landscape. It is often one that feels barren and dangerous and where we can feel alone. The loss of nurturing, or safety when you’re young, or losing a parent or a career - or even the possibility of the life you’ve dreamed of creating - each require more of us than we are prepared for. Doing our work - whether on the parts of ourselves we feel we lost years ago - relegated to the shadows - or the losses we experience in our more recent experience - all require attention and self-compassion to be integrated into our stories and our conscious lives if we are to rediscover a sense of wholeness and wholeheartedness.
The most transformative experiences of my life have been when I have surrendered to loss as an invitation to reshape my life and the meanings I have built around it. Loss can show up as a loss of a relationship, a death, loss of a dream. Like Carolyn Ellis, I have learned to write “when my world falls apart or the meaning I have constructed for myself is in danger of doing so”. In my own life I discovered that there is a large gap between knowing and experiencing how to rebuild a life after loss. And loss is such a huge part of our experience and one we’re often ill prepared to hold in our conversation reality.
Many have done the research to demonstrate that written narrative is linked to better mental and physical health, better long term psychological health, improved immune function, better life transitions, higher grades, lower anxiety, better working memory, lower depression-related thoughts. Finding coherence, particularly in the wake of difficult or emotionally charged experiences, is a key element of gaining access to shadow, but also to integrating the experiences of your life that shape your life whether you decide to actively participate or not.
Adopting Someone Else’s Story is Risking your Life
Some of us may feel we have “done our work” and that shadow work is a carryover from an older period in our psychological mythology. Shadow is only a metaphor for an internal process. Having a set of beliefs, identifying as part of a religious or spiritual group or even having a theological education sometimes functions to create a sense in the person that holding a set of beliefs - in the right way, with the right group - is a kind of way out of doing their own work.
This approach represents a kind of bypassing. One of our biggest mistakes comes to fruition when we fall asleep to this idea that our work is taken care of by an outside force by subscribing to a particular belief or practice. Because I hold this belief and I pray or meditate - Or because I practice mindfulness I am reaching this higher state or participating in this grander narrative in ways that ‘saves’. In a sense it is a kind of story acquisition. My story is messy and dark, but if I can acquire a new / better story - by adopting someone else’s, or learning the correct sacred text - I will be ok. When we relinquish responsibility and stop showing up to ourselves, we let the shadow take over.
If you don’t work through your pain or wounding, you will carry this forward into your relationships and community. What you are not aware of will hurt you, and the parts you deny will shape you far more than your good intentions ever will. What pain you don’t transform, you will transmit.
Stories Feature Our Inner Landscape and Situate Our Selves.
No one ‘wants’ to see their shadow. Our soul is beat up and injured in a myriad of ways at each stage of our developmental journey. And each wound leads to a unique way of patterning our thoughts and behaviours to avoid and defend and workaround our pain. What we choose to do or not do with this darker side of ourselves is what will define our future - not only our goals and habits and prayers and vision boards.
Getting access to the parts of our self that we’ve left behind or were lost is both an art and a science. It is not only true for the individual but for a community or organization or a broader segment of society. We use metaphor and myth, story and imagery, because our linear and clinical ways of gaining access to the deeper parts of ourselves offer few reliable answers to meeting and bringing to light these darker parts of ourselves. We need a metaphor - because maps are not often possible - to help give us a foothold in this backcountry part of ourselves.
Where our stories have shrunk, our gaze has lowered from the horizon, - our imagination has dulled - and so our capacity to appreciate and work with the darker parts of ourselves has dwindled. Our years of living out of habit make us unconscious to the greater stories and narratives at play in our life.
We live stories that are shaped by early experiences - bruises and hurts we experienced when we were ill-equipped to shoulder the burden. The stories we tell ourselves feature our inner landscape. It’s not only that our stories give us a sense of our inner landscape it’s that the stories we live rewrite what is possible for us - closing borders and erecting boundaries meant to protect not to expand.
“it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look around and listen.”
Mapping our inner landscape can be a frightening process. We have fooled ourselves into believing that the way we are now is who we really are - and the acceptance we search for is for this self we have created, not the person we have a suspicion we really are at our core. As we let our gaze follow the landscape within, we may find that the area we’ve come to inhabit is far smaller than we may have noticed. We’ve traversed the territory in ways that were unaware to the crevasses and subtle hills, where the richest parts of us can be found.
Mapping our experiences in ways that integrate rather than deny their impact is critical. Each time we try and make the “unintelligible and the painful…comprehensible and meaningful” we integrate the more difficult parts of ourselves into our greater whole - re-storying our lives in ways that empower and bring wakefulness. This does not mean we deny the painful parts of our experience, neither does it mean we let others off the hook for how we have been treated.
“Stories always pose that question: what kind of truth is being told? Stories never resolve that question; their work is to remind us that we have to live with complicated truths. Arthur Frank
What Truth is Your Story Telling/Obscuring
We are never without a story, and, we are never not in service to a story. What story are we living? What kind of truth has your story been telling? Does your story reveal or obscure the complicated truth you must face? Our Shadow Tells us What Role we SHOULD play in each story, not which role we CAN play. Are we living out our parents’ un-lived lives, compensating for their fears? Are we bought in to the values and beliefs of a particular group in order to hold on to social connections?
The measure of our lives will in many ways be the limits of the stories we are prepared to entertain and live out.
