Today I heard this story from the New Year's Day edition of NPR's "All Things Considered":
Lulu Miller's Editing Your Life's Stories Can Create Happier Endings
Or, as I'll definitely remember it, I Peed on Frankenstein!
In the piece, Miller and psychologist Tim Wilson discuss how "editing" one's own storytelling can help resolve issues and lead to happier endings. In particular, the work of psychologist James Pennebaker who has pioneered this work in life story editing.
Here's Pennebaker's page on "Writing and Health." It is a simple "how to" guide.
They also discuss how Miller's nephew rewrote his story of his Frankenstein encounter.
!
This method of revision makes sense on sooooo many levels.
First, consider how neural patterning occurs: neural pathways become more strongly connected (patterned) with use over time. This is how the brain creates thought, memory, and learning. The more a person does something -- or the more associated that learning is with something else, such as a strong emotion at the time of learning (or see this talk for more) -- the more this brain patterning (way of thinking) becomes the norm.
Second, consider learning at more "macro" levels, such as morning routines or driving routes which have become routine and not "consciously" thought about. This automaticity makes many other functions possible. (Seriously, how many of us really would want to have to discuss all the steps in tooth-brushing each and every day?) While it took deliberate conscious effort (that neural patterning again) to create some of these routines -- for example, it took one father and three boyfriends to teach me to drive stick -- they stick, once they have been successfully repeated enough times.
(This reminds me of the chapter about learning to drive from Patty Chang Anker's Some nerve: lessons learned while becoming brave. Read it for a great appreciation of what happens when emotion and learning conflict, resulting in a lack of automaticity!)
Third, we do this socially all the time. Revise ourselves, our stories, and our view of the world, I mean. Think about all the things you have said to yourself in front of the mirror before a date, a job interview, a dinner with the relatives....
For example, I have a girlfriend who believes strongly in affirmations, which seem like the verbal effort to positively edit the stories she tells herself about herself. She is always stronger and more capable in her affirmations. Actually, she is that in real life as well. Here is a woman to traveled to India and Tibet by herself! Yet, somehow, she learned the version of herself that is the opposite.....
The repetition makes the story part of you.
Finally, as any Southerner would tell you: why ruin a good story with the truth? A tale should get taller, i.e. better, with each retelling. And Southerners stand testament to revising themselves. See RuPaul for one example. Tullalah Bankhead for another. John Shelton Reed's chapters on "Editing the South" in Whistling Dixie: Dispatches from the South stand as a case in point for an entire region.
As we launch into a New Year, like the NPR piece noted, it is time to address both what is troubling and what is possible....
So why not rewrite your thinking?
For the good!
Image from Wikimedia Commons
