Photo by ANHELINA OSAULENKO on Unsplash
In my early 60s, I experienced a cascade of painful injuries that seemed to come out of nowhere. My lower back pain made it difficult for me to walk or sit. A pain down my right leg – tentatively diagnosed as sciatica – discouraged me from walking, my only regular Exercise at the time. I was seeing a physical therapist twice a week for heat treatments, needles, muscle massages, and more, with little consistent improvement.
One day a young physical therapist suggested I read Mind Over Back Pain by John Sarno, a doctor who theorized that pain was often a direct result of anxieties and mental Stress. (Neuroscientists have subsequently refined his theory but confirmed the basic phenomenon.) Reading that book had a profound effect. I realized that my pain was directly connected to my dissatisfaction with my work situation and my desire to end it. It was useful pain – it made it more likely that my Family would agree that I was too disabled to continue working.
Within six months of reading the book, all my pain went away. Physical Therapy can take the credit, but the true cure was realizing that my thoughts were manifesting physically, and that the whole exercise was not leading to a good outcome. By the time I reached the age of Retirement a few years later, I had developed a more positive outlook on life and a powerful desire to continue mine for as long as possible.
The British novelist Ros Barber has a similar tale about her chronic neck pain, which she finally connected to her constantly describing disagreeable people in her life as “a pain in the neck.” Barber interprets this as common figures of speech “casting spells” subconsciously. I take a slightly different view. I see it as our brains manufacturing stories that we come to believe so strongly that they create physical changes.
The brain loves a good narrative. Give it any two data points and it will automatically try to connect them through a narrative of cause and effect. Sometimes it only needs one fact to spin a tale.
“The brain is not a high-fidelity video recorder of everything that happens to us,” says Gregory Burns, an Emory University neuroscientist and author of The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent – and Reinvent – Our Identities. “Instead, it captures snapshots, or a highlight reel, of our lives. The role of narrative is to fill in all the spaces in between to construct an identity that makes sense to us.”
Scientists have discovered that the brain’s narrative-making machinery is hard-wired. “At our core, we are wired to translate information into narrative form, drive for resolution and meaning, and connect with others,” writes Jonathan H. Westover, a professor of organizational leadership at Utah Valley University. “When we hear information, the hippocampus works to identify cause and effect Relationships that arrange elements into logical sequences.” In short, “stories satisfy our neural craving for pattern recognition.”
But the stories we tell ourselves can prove harmful. Sometimes stories can even make us ill. A person can focus so much on their physical symptoms that it triggers emotional stress, which in turn disrupts normal functioning. The medical community calls this “somatic symptom disorder.” I would call it self-defeating narratives. For example:
We text a friend, get no response for three days, and weave an internal narrative that he must be angry at us – which may be true. On the other hand, his failure to respond could be a result of any number of other circumstances in his life.
As a friend of mine used to say – in her own act of self-narrative – “I get all my exercise leaping to conclusions.”
We get congratulations for a major accomplishment. But our interior narrative tells us it was not the result of our ability – we were just lucky.
We are overjoyed to welcome new grandchildren into the world. But internal narrative warns that every good event is followed by something bad. We brace ourselves and look for the next tragedy.
Fortunately, a therapy technique called narrative reframing helps people deconstruct the stories we tell ourselves and recreate more positive narratives. It starts by recognizing that our narratives of our lives are built on selected biographical details – and that we leave out other biographical facts that don’t fit neatly into the story line. By questioning the reality of the story we tell, and by opening the possibility of finding other facts that we previously excluded, we can reframe our narrative in a way that serves us better.
Easy to say, hard to do. Many of our narratives are deeply implanted and firmly entrenched. Challenging them is not a one-and-done exercise, but a continuous practice of being aware of the tales we tell ourselves.
Our brains are our friends, but we can’t always trust what they tell us. They do Love to make up stories.
