Is Storytelling Good For Us? That depends.

When personal narratives feel painful, they are too small for you

People are storytelling animals. We live, breathe, and dream stories. Some stories entertain us in all their forms — fairytales, fiction, memoir, and movies. Other stories, the ones I want to focus on here, are the scaffolds for our personal and collective reality. Everything we know about the world, everything that makes sense, is embedded in stories. I call these personal narratives.

Like stories that entertain, personal narratives come in a variety of forms and two basic sizes: small and large.

Small stories unfold from immediate circumstances and situations. Ask people about their lives, and they will share dozens of small stories. My neighbors are unfriendly, my workplace is satisfying, no one understands me, I’m a good listener.

The larger story, in which every small story is contained, widens the scope. It is richer, wiser, and usually more peaceful because the context it reveals pulls us out of the weeds.

The small and large of it: a personal example

Stories relating to identity and belonging run deep for most people. For me, a painful question about belonging has loomed large since childhood. Do I belong? Three approaches to find an answer have taught me much about the way I think.

At first, I projected the problem outward. Situations I landed in were full of people who, for unknown reasons, did not want to accept me. Long ago, this struck me as implausible, and I gave it up, thankfully.

A second strategy was to shine the spotlight on me. Perhaps I was unlikable or difficult to get along with in ways I could not discern. While I could not discount that possibility — I have my moments — turning on myself did not feel helpful. I felt friendly enough and no closer to a satisfying grasp of my predicament.

The third and most fruitful approach was to consider my family history, especially on my mother’s side. My mother grew up in an Italian ghetto in Connecticut as a first-generation immigrant. As the family story goes, she did not speak English until she went to school.

Belongingness was big in my mother’s life. She saw how she and her family were outsiders. They lived in an Italian neighborhood, spoke a different language, and followed different cultural practices and traditions. She grew up with a hunger to belong to U.S. culture. This undoubtedly influenced her decision to marry my father, a monolingual WASP with descendants from the Mayflower.

My mother’s experience instilled attitudes and beliefs that we children learned as the normal way to view the world. Included in these beliefs was a deep ambivalence about all matters related to belonging.

Which strategy works best?

The first two of my strategies illustrate the small story. I looked for answers in other people’s behavior and my own. The third approach looks more deeply for reasons about why something is as it is. It weaves background information, in this case, family history, into the small story to create a wider, more coherent understanding — the larger story.

It could be, for example, that feeling like an outsider gave me a disagreeable aura. This could cause people to find me difficult, or at least uncomfortable, to be around. That view enlarges my inner world. Possibilities for resolution come into sharper focus.

Discerning the larger story does not excuse or validate the actions of anyone who has caused you harm. It does, however, emphasize the fact of our interconnectedness. When that is clearer, even difficult small stories reveal redemptive and life-affirming elements.

Judgments obscure the larger story

In Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell talks about cultivating equanimity:

“You judge according to …the role you are playing in any given life situation…Unless you can learn to look beyond the local dictates of what is right and wrong, you’re not a complete human being. You’re just part of that social order.”

— (“Myth and the Self”)

Campbell’s remarks point readers away from small story judgments and toward the root causes held in the larger story. But getting to the larger story can be challenging. It requires silencing judgments to strip away everything that obscures the plain facts.

What is the uninterpreted story?

I once attended a dharma talk about storytelling. According to the speaker, a story could be a portal to wisdom or a labyrinth of confusion. It all depends on one’s capacity to see through it without unnecessary interpretation.

Without discernment and awareness, a narrative account of what happened rarely tells the simple truth. Storytellers enhance the facts by adding or deleting details until they conform to their view of the truth.

But we tend to forget this and believe that our version of events is somehow true and sufficient. We convince ourselves that others, had they seen the event, would certainly agree with our interpretation.

The problem is that others we imagine are usually our friends, people whose perspectives would likely be close to ours. So what we take for the truth turns out to be little more than a collection of repeating thoughts and received ideas.

Here’s a simple example.

“Of course I reacted as I did when so-and-so stood me up for our lunch date. I was insulted/irritated/(whatever) — anyone would have felt the same” — or so the story might go.

Eckhart Tolle suggests reframing the story: “I was there, she was not.” The bare facts are usually less complicated than the story we tell about them.

But how to get to the bare facts when offended? Charlotte Joko Beck has an idea.

“For the psychologically mature person, the…injustices of life are handled by counter-aggression…one makes an effort to eliminate the injustice and create justice. Often such efforts are…full of anger and self-righteousness. In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice, but compassion. Not me against you…fighting to gain a just result…, but compassion, a life that goes against nothing and fulfills everything.”

— from “Justice” in Nothing Special, Living Zen

For Beck, compassion is not some lofty abstraction reserved for saints. Its function is much simpler. When compassion comes into play, unhelpful stories evaporate.

In Pathways To Bliss, Campbell also shares his take on compassion as “…that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship.” For Beck and Campbell, a compassionate mindset sees the other’s story as one’s own.

Keeping our appointment with life

With compassion, the person alone in the restaurant can shift insulted feelings to a larger, more lucid story. They can acknowledge having behaved similarly in the past. It has been their story, too. Not today, but at some other time. They acknowledge that they are not very different from the friend who has let them down. Both are capable of breaking promises.

With compassion, the person in the restaurant ceases to stand themself up by fuming over the absence of the other. To do so means missing what Thich Nhat Hanh calls our “appointment with life,” i.e., the present moment. Instead, they are free to order lunch and have a relaxing meal.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed these reflections on the stories we tell ourselves.

Have you ever found peace in discovering the larger story behind a smaller, painful story?