You are Always More than You Think You Are
How many of us live in my head?
We know who we are because of the stories we tell ourselves. Based on our experiences and decisions, we construct narratives about our lives. This narrative-building activity is permanently unfolding in the backs of our minds and it directs much of our actions and choices, even if we are not always entirely aware of it. These narratives act like filters who color our perception and influence our decision making.
Perhaps the word “narrative” is slightly deceiving. We often don’t have the right words to tell these narratives to others or to ourselves. I compared narratives to filters because a narrative is insidious in that way: if you use a good filter on a photograph it will remain invisible, but it will significantly manage your impression of the photograph. The same goes for narratives. We can’t always put them into words, and they shape our decisions and actions completely outside of our conscious awareness.
When we start becoming aware of their existence and influence, we usually lack the ability to fully understand them. They speak a language of their own, a language of unusual symbols, moods, sensations. This is usually the point when we are tempted to unjustly call ourselves “irrational” and write them off as artefacts of bizarre neuronal interplay that needs to be remedied with a proper pill. Nothing like a good pill to allow us to keep believing that we have no responsibility for what we don’t like!
Most of us have done things that have made us feel terrible once we realized what our actions have led to. Even mere thoughts about doing something that goes against who we think we are can be pure horror! These are the situations when we step outside of our own self-narratives or, at the very least, we are about to do something that will make us question and possibly change them. In personal construct theory, we call these experiences guilt and threat. Our narratives appear to exhibit these protective mechanisms: feeling guilt or threat merely means that we have broken our own rules or are about to. It’s information, a warning, rather than a statement of fact. Even though guilt is not the most pleasant feeling in the world, bad emotions like that are vital in explicating and understanding who we are and where our limits are.
A careful reader may already be tempted to ask something along the following lines: if I am what I tell myself and sometimes I do something that I didn’t tell myself to do, are there actually two people inside of me, one doing the storytelling and the other making everyday decisions for me?
As strange as it may sound, the answer is, yes – there’s at least two of you inside your head! This notion of constructing who we are, based on what we have done in the past is a fundamental notion of constructivist psychology. Simply put: our experiences shape us. Our narratives come from culture (narratives about race and gender, for example) but more importantly they come and draw their strength from our lived experience. Our narratives are what we do with what happens to us.
Kelly, the father of constructivist psychology, likened men to scientists – we hypothesize about ourselves based on the decisions we’ve made in the past and then test these hypotheses with our behavior. This “scientific activity” is our basic storytelling process. We, constructivists, presumably inherited this notion from our pragmatist ancestors, most notably William James, who famously claimed there is “I” and “me”, one that makes decisions in real time and the other that explains them by telling stories about those decisions.
The good news is that scientists are finally catching up with our theorizing! There has been a lot of progress in finding neural correlates of what Kelly and James wrote about nearly a century ago. For example, we know now that medial prefrontal cortex plays an important role in the formation of our narrative experiences by linking together pieces of subjective experiences that have occurred in different points in time. This particularly interesting part of our brains also plays roles in forming and preserving our aspirations and hopes for the future, in seeing how similar we are to others, as well as in remembering our own traits.
Narrative vs Experience
A study by Farb and associates from University of Toronto identified two distinct neural networks for different kinds of self-referencing; these are the narrative focus (NF) and the experiential focus (EF).
NF gives shape to our experiences. It’s a daunting task that our brains have – we have abundance of experiences that need to be sorted out and grouped together based on similarities and differences. Furthermore, for as long as we live, we gain more and more experience, meaning that our narratives have to accommodate the new experiences as well as explain the old ones. New events will stretch, question and change old narratives so our psyche never rests because its job is never done. This process is taking place even now – these words you are reading and ideas contained within them will be placed somewhere in the complex network of your past experiences. Most of the time, our narratives don’t cause us problems; quite the opposite – any meaning we see in our lives comes from the stories we tell ourselves, but people who suffer from depression or anxiety will attest to the difficulties and problems they face because of constant rumination, attempts to retell experiences in meaningful ways and the void and confusion we feel when our narratives can’t offer any meaning and, consequently, any solutions. It’s more than fair to say that every narrative is a double-edged blade!
EF is what we notice when we focus on our immediate non-narrative experience. Mindfulness is a wonderful example of this – it’s a state in which we are grounded in our current sensory experience as it unfolds in its unpredictable and incomprehensible ways. Farb’s study showed that if one of these networks is active, the other one is not. By using neuroimaging techniques, this study showed that while we meditate, our experiential focus is more active than the narrative focus.
Who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy?
The answer will be vague and irritating – they are both good and they are both bad. We really do need both to live our lives. Much of our joy comes from immediate experience and, therefore, from EF. The pleasure you get from sex or sunbathing or wind in your hair or the taste of morning cofree comes mainly from EF, as well as those intense emotions you feel when you are touched by a piece of music or when you react to a work of art. By tuning into EF, we appreciate our immediate experience and emotions to a much higher degree. You don’t have to explain it away because you’re too busy enjoying it. On the other hand, we can’t really spend our lives tuned into our immediate experiences. For one thing, they can frequently be overwhelming and that’s where a good narrative focus can help diminish the anxiety by providing meaning and structure.
On the other hand, living inside our own narratives greatly diminishes our experience of living. Narratives give us perspective, goals and sets of actions that help us interact with the world, but they tend to be a little too convincing sometimes. Once we believe our narrative is all we are or who we “really” are and we forget that our narrative is precisely what the word says – a story and nothing more, we tend to neglect entire parts of our lives and swathes of needs and wants and miss out on potentially enormously rewarding experiences while at the same time greatly suffering should we fail to live up to our narratives. We tend to forget that even if our narrative collapses, it was never all of us to begin with!
The trouble with narratives
Another limiting aspect of the story of who we are is that it is so deeply entrenched in language. As Jacques Lacan famously said, even our unconscious is structured like a language – it is also a part of our NF. Words can, sadly, never capture the richness of our experience. If we choose to emphasize one aspect of our immediate experience, we neglect all others. If you ask if, for example, if I had a good time on my vacation, I can say “yes, it was wonderful”, and whereas this may be true in general, I will fail to convey all the small moments of frustration that I may have felt during my two-week vacation. Because there is no one word that can cover all of it. Even if I say “some of it was good and some of it was bad”, not all good things were good in the same way, nor were all bad things equally bad. Language, no matter how precise we want to make it, always erases nuances.
In order to bypass this limitation, I will have to tell a more detailed narrative. I will say “yes, it was wonderful, but…” and then I will list all those little frustrations and try to differentiate between them. However, if I carefully examine my memories, I may feel the need to clarify “wonderful” and expand it to encompass a wider set of my experiences. Maybe water temperature at the beach was wonderful, but it’s not the same kind of wonderful that the food may have been, or if I spent an evening with someone, that may contain a whole multitude of “wonderful” experiences. Wonderful experiences are sometimes often frustrating at the same time! Therefore, I will have to make my narrative even more detailed and comprehensive. Needless to say, even when I expand the narrative it will still be insufficient. It is always insufficient.
Words always fail us, without exception. They are all we have and we can’t do without them, but we always need more. Another name for the narrative focus is the default network. Despite of the fact that it’s so fundamentally and profoundly flawed, it’s important enough that it is considered our brain’s default mode.
Developing regular mindfulness practice naturally increases our experiential activity but it does something more than that. By teaching us how to stay with our experience and examine it carefully as it unfolds, mindfulness practice allows us to better balance between the narrative and experiential focuses of our brain. it also slowly builds the awareness that our narrative is not everything.
I am guided by my narrative but I am not my narrative. I am much more. It also gives us a different perspective on our narratives. It creates the seed for new ones too! The same way we constructed the ones we have now, we can slowly, with time, construct other stories in a more intentional, careful way. George Kelly thought that no one needs to be a victim of his or her circumstances, that our lives can be reconstructed so that we can make them more meaningful and more fulfilling. This is precisely the lesson that we learn from mindfulness – you can become someone else (and even then you will be more than you think).
