The college student was overwhelmed with the amount of work she had to do.
The college student felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work she had to complete. ither we came
It sounds odd to say that we might be locked within a story, but what might this curious expression mean? Chiefly, that we keep unknowingly repeating dynamics that go in very particular and not especially pleasant directions. We’re involved in stories of defeat, humiliation, suffering, fear, and loneliness, believing ourselves to be original at every turn while in fact rehearsing almost identical patterns in our choices and behaviors. We probably do this in two areas above all: our working lives and our love lives.
At work, some of the stories might go like this: every time I succeed, I fall prey to terror that others will want to destroy me out of envy, and I sabotage myself before they have a chance to ruin me. We can get locked in a story where we strive hard to win, but then the moment we do so, we grow fearful of enemies either real or presumed taking their vengeance out on us and stripping us of our advantages. It ends up being easier to fail at a time of our own choosing than to live in anticipation of random destruction at the will of others.
Oh, here’s another story: I end up playing the helpful friend to a more powerful, self-involved person who eventually takes all the glory for my efforts. According to this story, we play a meek, subservient character who smiles a lot, who listens more than they speak, and who winds up unrecognized and marginalized by our dominant friend whom we have helped to triumph in ways we never do.
Comparable sorts of stories might be going on in our love lives. For example, I am drawn to emotionally unavailable people whose love I relentlessly try to secure. According to this story, we repeatedly find ourselves in love with people who are either unable to love us back at all or do so in distracted or half-hearted ways. Maybe they’re rather cold or involved with someone else. Whenever an alternative story rears its head – a story involving someone kind and present – we make sure it will be refused and destroyed. We wonder, apparently sincerely, why love isn’t any easier.
Or, here’s another story: I get into relationships with good people who I then portray with random strangers before lamenting that I’ve been abandoned. In this story, we begin love stories with kind and good people whom we find ourselves drawn to, hurting them through affairs we’re not aware of actively seeking but that we can’t resist getting into – stories that are guaranteed to end in loss and sadness.
So why are we such addicts of these sorts of painful stories? As we might guess, because they play out in our adult present the essence of scenarios that unfolded in substantially similar ways in childhoods that we have neither understood nor liberated ourselves from at the hands of our caregivers. Once upon a time, the characters that are now played by our co-workers or people we meet on dating sites were played by mother or father in scripts we’ve lost sight of.
We repeat a narrative because specific sorts of pain and unfulfillment feel seductively familiar, and because we privilege familiarity over happiness. We have an impression that a story should go a certain way towards darkness, while joy and satisfaction give us a feeling of eeriness and illegitimacy.
Liberation can come when we dare to start an audit of our narrative choices. To help us, we might sketch out the last few relationships or workplace fiascos and see what similarities there might be between them. Who left who and why? Where was the pain coming from? How did we act, and how might this be a palimpsest of what happened somewhere long ago?
If we keep being involved in stories of betrayal at work, we can be almost certain that there was once a betrayal that we haven’t understood or overcome. If we keep needing to throw ourselves at the feet of unavailable people, there is probably someone’s love we once needed very badly and which we never faced up to not having. We need to go back and refine the original actors or we will never be left to get off the stage, and will keep following the same fruitless trajectories until we can better understand whither we came.