We have brains that make up stories all the time.
“Have I ever told you about the time?”
Stories entertain and play a vital role in our survival. Stories help us make sense of things we experience. The beginning middle and end we create help us anticipate future experiences, automate happenings and make meaning.
We are all on our own sheros journey. 🦄
On that journey, stories can help us to have context and create meaning, but they get in our way too. We can get so caught up in the story, so attached to the meaning we make that we miss novel experiences, fail at creating the new, including solutions to problems or interesting art. At worst, our stories create justification for the mistreatment of ourselves or others and reinforce our attachment to our world view as the “correct one.”
If we see a person running down the street, we instantly make up a story about why they’re running. The story is based on whatever sensory information we take in through our eyes, ears, bodily senses. It is rarely a conscious process.
Later that day if we run into a friend or co-worker and comment that we saw someone running, if they saw the same person running, we will trade stories.
It only takes one person or one thing in our external world for us to confirm or corroborate that our story was ‘true.’ One thing, and we are certain. But, we don’t know the truth. We just have a story, an approximation of what occurred.
Now what if that story you have made up is about a problem with a group of people, a situation in the world or about yourself that limits positive change and growth?
Here we are on our journey and in comes the blockade, the mountain, or just that thing we keep circling back to again and again. We WISH the thing would change. But really the only thing we can change is us.
Take a marriage or any long-standing relationship. Our mate is late to dinner, and we are frustrated because ‘they are always late, and I am fed up.’ While the other person actually tried and thought they successfully came on time. We have all been there, waiting for the person we know well to cross that trip wire and “gotcha, I knew you were going to do that!”
When we use story to anticipate actions and to justify our responses, we our bound to repeat history. We need to interrupt the behaviors that keep us stuck in a pattern that keep us going towards the same results over and over again.
How?
We need awareness, contrast, and novelty.
If you show somebody an image of a person and make it so they are unable to blink for an extended time (there is a way to safely do this), the person eventually does not see the image in front of them! The brainbody automates the image and makes it background information, no longer crucial for the body and brain to be conscious. The neurons in the eye and ocular system are firing in the brain, but the viewer is no longer conscious of seeing an image.
Most of us have not had our eyes held open like this, but we have all walked into a room with a strong smell we either liked or disliked. At first you smell it and react. Eventually you don’t notice the odor. Just like the unblinking image experiment, your neurons that register the smell continue to be active, but because your brain automates it, and you no longer notice it.
The brain and nervous system attend to novelty. It is what we need to notice because we can anticipate and automate it less easily. It might be dangerous or amazing after all!
Let’s go back to the person running past you…
- If that person was in jogging clothes you will automate the story one way.
- If the person running down the street was wearing business attire, you will create a different story.
- If the person running down the street is wearing a clown costume, that will catch your attention in yet another way, you will make some conscious guesses and then create a novel story.
- If they were not clothed at all, that would really catch our attention. You would really wonder, and guess what the story was.
They key here is that the more unusual the situation in contrast to our experience, the more we are going to wonder about it and the more attention it will get from our body/brain. We will still try to make sense of it and believe a story we make up, but we will question it and it will get our attention more effectively.
If you blinked in the eye experiment, the contrast between eyes closed and eyes open would make it so you continued to see the image in front of you. If you left the room and went outside to get a breath of fresh air from the odor in the room, when you reentered the room, you would smell the odor. It is the contrast that allows you to notice.
Given this is how we learn and what our brain does to make sense of our lives then how do we bring learning and novelty into the places where we get stuck?
We start with knowing that we do not know the full reality. Our perception of the world is what we have to go by, and it is worth questioning. It is also worthwhile to work on attuning our perception. It is a fine instrument that can get better. It is how we perceive and how well we can dial in our ability to perceive new information that is really valuable.
Sensation in the body are the easiest habits to track to increase your overall ability to attune to the world through your sense. Sensations help us build awareness. When we pay attention to sensation we get better at perceiving detailed information about ourselves and our experiences in the environment.
As we attune to muscular effort, we encounter our habits and patterns. That sore back, that shoulder that is raised up. Those muscular efforts have become habits. They do not totally cease contracting even when we mean to rest. Each of us has some muscular effort that is unnecessary akin to this.
The unnecessary muscular effort it was is what prevents our ability to feel anything new.
It is the unnecessary muscular effort we make that is a representation of our past habits, our past actions and our past stories.
When we learn how to give up that unnecessary effort that restricts us to repeating our past, then we can become aware then we can change, do something differently than we did in our past. Then we see and feel ourselves in new and novel ways. New stories and plot lines become possible.
My husband was upset that according to him, I was late to dinner last night. I thought I was on time. We got into an argument. I was upset because I had made a special effort to show up on time. He was upset because I had not answered his text and he was waiting for me. We each have our story. Each an approximation of the whole situation.
If I stay overly attached to mine, and he to his, we will get nowhere. We will have the same disagreement again and again. We will repeat our future based on our past.
Today, I am trying to interrupt that reactive defensive pattern. The key is to find where I am holding on in my body, to check in with that place and see if I can do something else there. Changing my muscular effort is WAY SIMPLER than trying to change my mind. One proceeds the other.
In Somatics we say story follows state.
When we change the state of our muscular contractions, we change the state of our nervous system. When we change the state of our nervous system, we change the state of our whole Being. We can be open to new information, using the prosocial part of my nervous system instead of staying contracted and work with the defensive part of my nervous system.
Last night, or even now when I reflect on what happened, is easy to feel that I am contracting my belly, and bracing there in defense. When I allow softening of my jaw, and my belly , my breath changes – so does my mind and my heart. When I speak with my husband from that state, we begin to new way forward, we begin to write a new story. Line by line.
All my best to you,
Astra
