The dark side of narrativizing

The stories that trap us — and how revision can help

Way back in *checks notes* November (jeez), I wrote a piece here about narrativizing experience. In a great many words, I described how salubrious it can be to tell the story of something exciting or stressful or terrible that happened to you a short time after it happens, and indeed that doing so helps us process and release the stress. Children, particularly ones with loving adults around, do this naturally, often telling the story over and over again until they’ve integrated the experience and gotten through the fear and pain of it. Doing so, I argued, helps keep traumatic experiences from turning into post-traumatic stress. Here it is, in case you missed it:

Afterward, though, a reader’s comment got me thinking about the ways this process can contribute to traumatic imprinting—and future perpetration of it. As with so many things, if that same child above doesn’t have a loving adult around, or has an abusive adult around, then the narrative can come out very differently. Indeed, I sometimes think that whether or not an aversive experience coalesces into a trauma depends on who gets a hold of the narrative first.

With parents and children, this is obviously going to be the parents most of the time, simply due to the power dynamic inherent even in families where there isn't overt abuse. If a child isn’t growing up in an environment where they’re made safe to tell the stories of their own experiences, then the parents will tell them for them—often in a way that’s more convenient, or self-aggrandizing, or less upsetting to them, the parents.

Content note here: depictions of nasty and abusive parenting moments

Imagine the same child from the above post, the one who fell off the merry-go-round and hurt his knee. Instead of being invited to create the story of what happened, telling it over and over after school, at dinner, in the bath, at bedtime, until he has a handle on it, this version’s caregiver storms up, angry that the kid’s been hurt, and swoops him off the ground in a huff. The kid’s wailing, but the caregiver offers no comfort. “What did you do something so stupid for?” the parent snarls. “I told you that thing was dangerous, it’s not my fault you never listen.”

Or the caregiver is distracted and disengaged from the kid, and doesn’t even acknowledge him until he comes running up, wailing and holding his knee. “Oh, knock it off,” this caregiver sighs, annoyed. “You just skinned your knee, you’ll be fine. Stop crying.” A truly awful version of this one includes mockery of the child’s cries. Another version has the parent returning to their phone and letting the kid handle it themselves. A less awful version might include a small amount of comfort in the form of minimizing. “Come ‘ere,” they might say, “let me see it. You’re fine. We’re gonna put a band-aid on it and you get right back out there.”

In none of these cases does the kid have a chance to make sense of what’s happened to him, with the help of an attentive, reflective adult. Instead the adult makes sense of the story for him, and the story becomes something like “I’m clumsy, I never listen, I shouldn’t have done that and gotten hurt because it made Mommy mad,” or “I interrupted important grownup things by getting hurt, I shouldn’t bother them,” or “I’m a big baby, I’m not brave, I get too upset and scared when I’m hurt and it makes Daddy ashamed of me.” There are countless variations on this theme, but considering all the livid colors these particular bruises take would be a book in itself.

How control of the narrative passes down the generations

The point is that narrativizing, this natural, birthright process, can be interrupted, corrupted, and suppressed to the point where a child has very little sense of their own autonomy and lived reality. For traumatized adults—very much including the parents who treat their kids in these ways—the cycle continues. Often such adults are either lost without a domineering person in their lives to tell them what to do and how to understand themselves, or reactively build very strong (but brittle, inflexible, and inaccurate) narratives about their own experiences that put them frequently at odds with the people in their lives.

When one of each of these types get together, you might call them a codependent and a narcissist; when two of either type get together, it’s its own kind of shitshow. In every little interaction, each person's story about What Happened can get so embedded that the two are no longer even inhabiting a shared reality. Or the two muddle along together, looking for someone to appease.

(And then there’s what budding autocracies do with the media in order to control the narrative experiences of a populace…but that’s getting just a little bit out of scope. Still. The problem I’m addressing here works on both the individual level and systemically.)

It's worth noting, and maybe I should have in the original essay, that one of the things that trauma damages is the very ability to do this kind of narrativizing. It's much harder for a person who has been repeatedly gaslit to make sense of their own experience, to make consistent and coherent stories about who they are and what their life is like. It's a specific but very important component of trusting oneself, this ability to believe that one's choices are one's own, and that they're good choices. Unfortunately, this also goes the other way: some severely traumatized people become very sure of themselves indeed, but their ideas are harmful and wrongheaded. Rather than being unable to land on a coherent narrative, they crystallize around an incoherent one that makes them feel safe and in the right, and generally hurt everyone around them in the process.

So if we come from an insecurely attached background (some estimates say this is 50% of us!), and this capacity in us has been damaged, sometimes repeatedly, how do we heal it?

The key is in revision. When the first story that forms around an incident is limited or shameful, or created and controlled by someone else, what the hurt person needs is the capacity to tell the story over, their way.

What does it mean to revise an internal narrative?

That capacity itself is what has been damaged, of course; it can be incredibly difficult for someone who has been repeatedly harmed in this way to take control of their narrative again. Sometimes the biggest step toward healing that a traumatized person takes is that first step out of the reality-sphere of the abuser: the one who created the fractured world in which they lived. The moment when an adult suddenly knows with their whole body that what happened to them was terrible, and that it wasn’t their fault? Everything that comes after that is revision. First, though, the spell must be broken, the old story dismantled. (The many ways that can happen is for a future post.)

After that first step, it’s all about practicing the skill of revising every chance you get.

The process can be easier if you’re free of the people who embedded those narratives. People I’ve known who had abusive childhoods and removed themselves from their parents, for example, have often been able to do the work needed to quiet and heal the internal voices that told them how much they sucked all the time. They might still be tempted sometimes, or fall into a pattern of calling themselves stupid or worthless. But they practice, and after some time they can even begin to believe that they are worthy.

It can be harder, a lot harder, if you still have someone in your life who reinforces harmful narratives on the regular. Maybe your dad was shitty to you, but you still talk to him because he wasn’t so shitty that you had to remove him from your life. Maybe you were married to someone awful, but you still need to talk to them because you have kids together, and every time you do they say something that puts you right back there.

The trick here is to have a plan, and to stick to it. Before you go into the situation, remember what your own story is, what you want it to be. Instead of “I am incompetent and ruin everything,” maybe it’s “I set healthy boundaries and do great work at what I’m good at.” Instead of “I’m a bad son who makes my mother’s life so hard with my ungrateful attitude,” maybe it’s “I visit my mother because I care about her, and her bottomless need is her own trauma that I can’t fix.”

It’s really tough, sometimes, to hold onto these new narratives in the face of the old wounds. So much of trauma healing, it seems to me, is like working out. You have to do the same motions repeatedly, set new patterns and habits. You have to not do it too hard, or you’ll injure yourself and have to heal more, start over. But you have to do it hard enough that you can start to see a difference. The day that you say to yourself, “Hey, you know what—this person’s drama is not my problem, and I’m doing my best here,” and actually believe it? That’s when you know the magic is starting to work.

But the stories we tell ourselves—and the people who have our backs—matter enormously. Make sure you have allies. Tell them the true stories over and over. Write them down. Repeat them to your secret heart as you fall asleep.

I am worthy, and I am loved, just as I am.