Friday: Memories: The Story Telling Mind.

Creating our lives is a constant reconstruction and creation of memories, making new ones and reinventing old ones. Within our minds we are all story tellers constantly sculpting the story of who we are and how we became who we are. Facts have little to do with the truth as we create it in our minds. An old axiom says something to the effect that a person becomes whom he/she thinks about all day long.


We all think about our lives. Sometimes we dramatize trauma and sometimes we minimize trauma. If we are optimists we will make it better. If we are pessimists we will make it better. We go through each day looking for events and ideas that prove the reality that we have constructed is true. And, what is interesting we often tend to ignore or minimize the events or thoughts that negate our perceived reality about self and the world.


There are themes to each of our lives that represent the story that we are creating about who we are and how we became who we are. Some of us are heroes. Some of us are survivors. Some of us are victors. Some of us are just darn clueless. Every person has a story. Our stories drive our lives and help us take sometimes unrelated events and a state of chaos and create order on our reality so that we can perceive ourselves as one and whole and fluid in our experience. We take discreet events and put them together in a story board of our lives. When the discrete events do not fit together in the actual time line of facts, we will rearrange the events in our mind to fit our own sense of unfolding reality.


There are consensus markers that we use to hook our stories onto and create a sense of congruency with society. Some of these are huge catastrophes like wars, assassinations, a cataclysmic act of Mother Nature such as a hurricane that kills thousands, and so forth. Some of these are happy events shared in common with close friends and family such as weddings, vacations, birth of a baby, or moving to a new home. But in between the markers are the events that weave the color into our personal stories.


While it would almost be impossible to convince the majority of people that their lives are a fantasy that they have reconstructed from their perception of reality, the only truth that usually lies in a memory is that we take a few facts and weave them into a new reality every time we think about the past. We embellish. We dramatize. We think we are being factual when we are probably being fractal.


For those who are living life in discomfort and not achieving the contentment that they would like in the present, reconstructing the past and retelling our stories in ways that enhance our lives can be extremely healing and enriching.


The next time an event happens in the present watch what memories are evoked and see what behaviors are being reinforced. What descriptors do you use to express your emotions concerning the event and what descriptors do you use to describe you? How are you using the past to shape your present? And more importantly, how are you combining the past with the present to create your future?


Remember, it is your story. You can tell it anyway you want. Why not make it fun, interesting, and empowering?