The role of narrative in who we are

It transpires that giving ourselves ‘a good talking to’ may be the best way to self-improvement after all – in a gentle way at least. 

I have been aware of the role of narrative (the stories we tell ourselves) in terms of what we believe about ourselves, but I have only recently come to realise the extent to which our internal dialogue not only shapes, but actually enables, our identity. 

It began in an incidental comment on Monday, when someone said to me that we witness our own experiences linguistically.

From there I went on to watch a video by Steven Hayes on ‘A liberated mind‘ where he defines the creation of words as being a social act, and describes how this moves our thinking forward and finally to an amazing podcast which I heard this morning called ‘The Power of Words‘ (downloadable as an mp3 file) which left me blessed and astounded – as it appears to have done for so many people before me. 

It appears that our personal grasp of language determines our ability to think conceptually, and that while we can process our experiences without language, we need language to think about how we process those experiences.

When we talk to ourselves, we are thinking, we are exploring, combining and reinterpreting concepts which enrich or apply our understanding, and enable us to add value to the situations around us. 

According to Charles Fernyhough, it transpires that language serves not only to communicate between minds, but also between different systems within a single mind.  In other words, if we want to improve much of what we do, and in particular how we relate to others (which is an increasingly large component of all our work) then we need to talk to ourselves. 

And it is that talking to ourselves which forms and supports our identity, as illustrated by the story of Jill Bolte Taylor – a neuro scientist who lost her sense of identity and definition of herself in relation to the external world when a blood clot rendered her speech centres ineffective. 

Up until this point, I have only thought of language as the outworking of our thinking, but this podcast and my experiences this week have drawn me to understand that, in many ways, it IS our thinking. 

But I wonder, as I also struggle to quell the voices in my head in order to better adopt mindfulness techniques and the sense of right-brain consciousness to which Jill Bolte Taylor refers, whether the adoption of words and language is also exclusive. That selecting words to express and shape our concepts also blocks us from aspects of our thinking which are outside our current definition of those words – but then again, at least having those words enables us to test that hypothesis and perhaps develop through it.