The Story Solution
Change Your Toxic Self-Story and Thrive
When the Story is the Problem: Why the Stories We Tell Ourselves about Ourselves are the Root Causes of our Psychological Struggles
Hello and a very warm welcome. I’m Anna Katharina Schaffner, a writer, coach, and clinical hypnotherapist, and I am so glad that you’ve joined my Substack.
The Story Solution is about one of the most powerful and also most neglected forces in our lives: the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Often, we aren’t even aware of these stories. They may just hum along in our subconscious mind, and yet they shape our sense of self and our reality in a very profound way.
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves really matter: they determine how we interpret our past and present, and they also shape the parameters of the playing field for our future. On this new Substack, I will share reflections, stories and powerful metacognitive tools with you so that you can become aware of, truly understand, and then challenge and change the self-stories that no longer serve you.
And know that it is possible to change our stories. It is true that our stories may have been with us for a very long time and that they were mostly written in the past, but that doesn’t mean that they are written in stone.
We are not just story-telling animals but also learning animals: we can learn to cultivate self-awareness and actively to pay attention to our story- and thinking-patterns. We can learn to recalibrate our attention, to access and spotlight different memories, and to develop kinder interpretations of our past. Just as we can train our bodies, or learn new practical skills, we can also learn to use various mental tools that help us to control our attention and reframe our judgements.
1. What is a self-story and why does it matter?
Let’s start with definitions. What is a self-story? A self-story is the tale you’ve built over time to explain who you are and how you came to be. It curates selective moments, characters, and circumstances of your life into a coherent whole. It can be supportive and generative – or toxic and destructive.1 It shows up as the inner voiceover of our life. A voice that selects scenes to remember, that directs our attention in the present, and that constantly comments on and interprets what is going on.
Self-stories are sense-making tools, designed to impose order on the chaos of our existence. Our inner narrator establishes relationships and causality. It will say, because of x, y happened, and because of y, z happened, and so on, stringing disparate events together into a narrative sequence of cause and effect. Joan Didion wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” If our inner narrator is harsh, blaming, or limiting, it shapes our reality in painful ways. If it’s compassionate, expansive, and encouraging, it unlocks possibility.
We constantly spin narratives in our head – about the world, other people, what we are doing and seeing. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are especially important. They shape our sense of identity, our interpretations of our past and our expectations for our future. What is more, they also very significantly determine our overall sense of well-being and life-satisfaction.
Crucially, our self-stories can be either helpful or unhelpful. They can energise and empower us, or they can dramatically hold us back. In some cases, they can keep us trapped in old cycles of self-blaming, self-loathing, or self-sabotage, or else cycles of world- and other-blaming.
2. Toxic scripts
In my coaching practice I have learned that so many people tell themselves unhelpful stories. Seemingly confident, intelligent, highly successful people from whom you would never expect it. Maybe you are held back by a toxic story, too. Maybe you are telling yourself that you are not smart or attractive enough. Perhaps you tell yourself that you are not a good person, or that you are the best and that everything is beneath you, or that you are a helpless victim, or profoundly different from everybody else and destined to remain alone and misunderstood. If that is the case, please know that you are not alone.
In the self-blaming self-stories, we turn our aggression against ourselves and experience feelings of shame, guilt, loathing, or disgust. And in the world-blaming ones we may turn our aggression outwards — experiencing feelings of anger, resentment, bitterness, or disappointment.
These stories are like old scripts we’ve internalised somewhere along the way, and they whisper things like: You’re stupid. You’re ugly. You’re bad. You’re the best. You’re a victim. You are incurably different, destined to stay alone. And because they repeat so often and sound so familiar, we start believing them. We start living by them.
The key features of the six most common toxic scripts are clearly present in psychological and self-help literature and research, although they are usually discussed there under different names. You may, for example, have come across terms such as negative core beliefs, the inner critic, saboteurs, automatic negative thoughts and anticipatory ideas. While these are helpful concepts, the point is that they are all generated by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They are the rotten fruit of our toxic self-stories. The headline takeaways from our stories, they are generated by much more complex, deeper narratives. If we want to change our unhelpful core beliefs, we have to address their narrative root causes.
Toxic self-stories are like invisible code running quietly in the background, sabotaging our wellbeing. And no amount of external success or surface-level fixes can touch them. And that’s the trouble with toxic self-stories. If we don’t address the narrative root causes of our unhelpful core beliefs, all the mindset work, cognitive reprogramming, positive thinking, and life-hacking in the world won’t help. Because the problem isn’t just what we do and think and feel – it’s the story behind why we do and think and feel things in a certain way.
3. Change is possible
Our stories may have been with us for a long time – for so long, in fact, that we don’t even recognize them as stories but take them as literal truth about ourselves. But we are not condemned to telling ourselves the same unhelpful tales that block us from thriving over and over again until the end of our days. The paradoxical truth about our self-stories actually works in our favour: We are the main characters, the narrators, the interpreters and the creators of our stories, and that also means that we can change them. While our story shapes us, our story is also ours to shape.
The aim of this Substack is to help you to replace your old, unkind, biased and unhelpful stories with more compassionate and generative ones. It will help you to explore what you keep telling yourself about your past, present and future. I will illuminate recurring patterns, harsh or even cruel judgements I keep coming across in my work with clients, and the most typical faulty reasoning and cognitive biases in our attention and memory.
I have recently come across a great concept - ethical hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, and ethical hermeneutics invites us to make interpretations that are as fair as possible. Interpretations that are not wilfully biased, ungenerous, or outright malicious, that respect otherness, and that seek to become aware of our own blindspots.
We are often extremely unfair interpreters of our own lives and qualities, sometimes shockingly so. I hope that this Substack will help you to become a fairer, more balanced interpreter of your own life and also of that of others. That it will empower you to begin the transformative work of reframing, perspective-changing, recalibrating attention, mobilising different explanations and envisaging brighter, better futures. It is possible to change the way in which you see and judge yourself and learn to look both at what has already happened and what is possible in the future in a different way.
Please feel free to pass this Substack on to whoever you think might benefit from it.
My work builds on and develops further the research of various narrative psychologists, in particular Dan McAdams, who has written two excellent books on the subject: The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (1997) and The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (revised and expanded edition 2013).
My own approach combines insights from narrative psychology with tools from ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), solution-oriented coaching (in particular, co-active methods), CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), clinical hypnotherapy, and Stoicism.