The Power of Perspective

I had heard the saying we become what we think about a thousand times before it resonated. It wasn’t until my own mental health crumbled and I ended up in an eating disorder treatment facility that I had a therapist begin questioning my thought patterns. What makes you believe you need to shrink? What makes you think no one likes you? My therapist’s questions were puzzling to me. I had never once thought to question these beliefs that repeated over and over in my head, informing how I behaved and felt. The beliefs felt true. And why would I question the truth? However, my therapist’s questions showed me there are multiple perspectives for every experience. After years of struggling with my eating disorder, it was the moment I began building a new perspective of my thoughts that I began to see actual transformation and healing.

Narrative Therapy in a Nutshell

My experience in eating disorder treatment was my first introduction to the concept of narrative therapy. Narrative therapy is a type of therapy that emphasizes the stories we develop and carry through our lives. These stories are reinforced by the meanings we interpret from them. These meanings can turn into core beliefs we hold about ourselves. For example, growing up I experienced a lot of social rejection from my peers, which I came to interpret as people not wanting to be around me, which led me to believe no one liked me. Someone else might have a narrative they cling to in which they believe they are unlovable, problematic, difficult, and so on.

The meaning that we take from our stories goes on to impact our emotions, relationships, self-talk, and behaviors. It can cause us to either exist in ways that promote self-confidence and growth or self-destruction and low self-esteem depending on the beliefs that repeat (either conscious or unconsciously) in our heads. The goal of narrative therapy is to help people re-author their stories and emphasize events that lead to positive, motivating, and empowering meanings rather than self-destructive ones.

In graduate school for mental health counseling, I was introduced to a wide range of therapeutic orientations — cognitive-behavioral counseling, psychodynamic psychotherapy, existential therapy, etc. — but the one style of counseling that stuck with me was narrative therapy. Narrative therapy stuck with me because it is an empowering approach to counseling where the client is seen as the expert and the client’s problems are seen as resolvable. Narrative therapy states that we suffer when we get stuck living in a story that is negative and self-destructive. It also gives us the power to edit, trim, and transform those stories into plots that extract empowering and healing meanings.

Fast-forward, I am now a mental health therapist who has my own private practice working with dozens of people every week. Whenever I begin working with a new client, they introduce me, quite quickly, to the problem that had led them to seek help. Some examples of problems include eating too much, eating too little, drinking too much, unhealthy attachments, arguments with their spouse, social anxiety, poor work performance, lack of motivation, poor self-care, no self-confidence, struggling with their identity, etc.

At face value, these problems all seem different, but I have come to understand them as the same. The problems are merely symptoms of a deeper narrative that each person is stuck on. The narrative attached to the problematic symptoms becomes their dominant plot. Even though life is complex and we are simultaneously living multiple narratives at one time, (about our relationships, our work, our appearance, our past, present, and future, etc.) it is the dominant plots that take up the majority of our headspace. And, if the dominant plot causes us to draw self-deprecating meanings, then we begin to see negative impacts in our lives.

Collecting Evidence to Support Our Narrative

We search for evidence that reinforces our dominant narratives, and when we go searching, we inevitably find the evidence. I am a problem, then we hold onto all the past experiences we have had that tell us we are a problem. I am unlovable, then we search for every interaction that caused us to feel rejected and dismissed. We can essentially make anything reinforce our self-defeating beliefs. I used to hold onto the belief people didn’t like me. When I was attached to this belief, even someone bumping into me on a crowded sidewalk could lead me to believe we collided because of something I did wrong.

Commonly, when we are seeing problems in our life the narratives, we are linked to are ones with negative, self-defeating meanings. By the time people end up in my office for therapy, those narratives are already accompanied by mountains of evidence for why the person believes them to be true. They’ve typically been accumulating examples for years. My goal in therapy is to show people there are different perspectives to their problematic narratives.

Forming a new perspective requires us to build a new narrative. However, it takes a lot of work and intentionality to begin writing a new story that accompanies a new, empowering narrative. At first, this new narrative will feel weak because it doesn’t have as much evidence attached to it. It takes time but it is possible to strengthen a new story enough that it becomes the dominant plot informing how we interact with our life.

The Impact of Finding a New Perspective

Every event in our life has multiple ways it can be interpreted. Think about when witnesses are interviewed after a crime has taken place and the variability in each of their stories. We can apply the same logic to our own thoughts, beliefs, and memories. They are an infinite number of interpretations we can make of the mountains of evidence we collected that was previously in support of our old dominant plot. We are the author of our narratives and therefore we hold the ability to edit the stories that are reaping problematic beliefs and leading to problematic symptoms.

When we re-author our dominant plots so that they lead to empowering conclusions, we begin to see an abundance of personal growth. We no longer feel trapped by the problems that used to dictate our lives. We begin to feel a sense of freedom knowing that we hold the power to change our perspective, which in turn can change our entire way of being.

Remember, we become what we think about.