Meeting our Challenge by Changing Our Story
Meeting our challenge by changing our story
“Uniting to fight the foes we face: anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness. With unity, we can do great things, important things. We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome the deadly virus. We can reward, reward work and rebuild the middle class and make health care secure for all. We can deliver racial justice and we can make America once again the leading force for good in the world.
I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real, but I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we're all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonization have long torn us apart. The battle is perennial and victory is never assured.”
– Joe Biden, Inauguration address
The human experience is made of stories.
Our minds continuously assess the environment and take in important stimuli. From the stimuli, filtered through our memories and learning we create stories.
Why do stories matter so much? Stories help us respond to our world. Stories allow us to judge danger and help us create safety and predictability. Stories also set the compass toward our future. The human capacity to imagine various futures can be our glory or our curse. To imagine a future increases the odds we act on it. If we act on it, we create it.
Our stories are powerful weapons that can harm. In World War I, our nation had strong ties through immigration to Germany. Overnight in 1917, when America entered the war, Germans became enemies and German-Americans were suddenly hated and feared. The same thing happened in World War II to German Jews and Japanese-Americans.
Or as we see in medicine every day, our stories heal. We imagine futures free of disease or injury. We tell stories about what is wrong through diagnosis. Then we set out to manifest that reality. Our individual and collective stories are shaped by experiences, by our families, by our religions and by our culture.
Our stories are shaped by us too.
The thing we often forget is that our stories are just that – stories. We have the power to tell the same old story or start a new one. We can step back from our certainty and we can re-write that story. Surfacing the hidden emotional and cognitive narratives to change them is the work of psychotherapy. More broadly it is the work of life.
We have the power to tell a story of evil and destruction, or one of hope and goodness. If I fault the media these days, it is because the stories are almost all bad. It seems we are swamped in a world of stories of corruption, injury, woe. Too often the cruel stories begin at home with some version of how deficient I am. Some version of how my looks aren’t enough, my achievement isn’t enough, not sufficient as a child or parent or lover. Then the stories are about how my work or my loved ones let me down. The weather is bad, the epidemic is bad, the schools are bad, the government is bad, etc.
Choose stories of hope and love
It is equally true that every day, there are millions of stories of kindness, of determination and of inspiration. There are more reasons to hope than there are to despair. Do we tell ourselves those stories? Do we remind ourselves of the courage to be found in getting through the epidemic? Do we not see our colleagues, our managers, our friends and our families every day rising to the occasion? When we tell this story in the future – will it be one of failure, or how we met these challenges?
“Many centuries ago. Saint Augustine, a saint in my church, wrote to the people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. Defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we as Americans love, that define us as Americans? I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor and yes, the truth.” – Joe Biden, Inaugural Address
Our President today encouraged us to change the story. He asked us to enter this new chapter and stop glorifying the objects of our fear and pain. He asked us to enter this new chapter defined by the things we love, as individuals, as Americans and as humans. Shall we take up that challenge?