The Hidden Stories Holding You Back

Read time: 4 mins

QOTW

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." — Carl Jung

In this week’s dose, I share how the stories we tell ourselves shape our lives - for better or for worse - and how to change yours.

I identified with outcomes. I thought that if I got an outcome, I would mean something.

If I got into a good college.
If I saved a lot for retirement.
If I got a job at a prominent company.
If I got married, bought a house, had kids.

I thought it’d all mean something about me.

But what would it mean? To who?
Who is measuring this?

And if I claimed to measure this myself, how/where/when did I learn to measure life in this way?

Or it could be simpler things…

The clothes I choose to wear.
The car I choose to drive.
The town I live in.

What am I making those mean?
Do I believe those things matter?
Or do I believe they don’t matter at all?
And why do I believe that?

I know that my beliefs felt so rock-solid. Like an anchor of truth within me.

I never really questioned them; what I thought felt like my true reality.

When did I start believing this was how life needed to be lived?
But where did this decision come from?
At what point did I learn this?

I began to see how it’s all just been a story.

Not only how I was raised, disciplined, rewarded, etc.

But also how society responded to my behavior.

And how I then interpreted society’s response to my behavior.

Layers of subjectivity upon subjectivity upon subjectivity.

All creating models and narratives that I’ve been unknowingly trapped within.

Who was right?
Who decided they knew how to live?

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became.

And I started to realize that everyone who was doing this had ALSO been subject to the same type of programming.

I developed a “story” about life based on how I unconsciously interpreted it:

When I get low grades = bad
When I make people laugh = good
When I earn a lot of money = increased status
When I dress nice and groom myself = more attractive
When I have similar interests to others = they accept me

Add in all of my personal preferences and I created my own recipe for what life meant.

I thought I had been a realist and was seeing life as it came.

But I was doing anything but that.

I was not seeing life for what it was. I was seeing life through my own perception.

Like putting on rose-tinted glasses → everything appears rosy.

If you wore rose-tinted glasses since the day you were born, nothing would appear “rosy” because “rosy” would be all you know. Everything would just look normal to you.

You’d have no reason to second-guess or question how things were.

Zero reason to believe that what you were seeing was not, in fact, reality.

You would only realize the effect of your glasses when you removed them.

Only at that point - of being aware of 2 possible perspectives - can you begin to understand the subjective nature of life.

This is how we live as humans.

We’re not seeing life for what it is, we’re seeing our own projected reality reflected back to us.

It’s why conflicts & war exist. Because people are identified with a story.

It’s why people get so riled up with politics. Because they are identified with a story.

It’s why people get plastic surgery and injections. Because they are identified with a story.

Grasping tight to concepts & models believing they are concrete truths.

There’s no fault in this, it’s the condition of the human mind to do this.

But concepts are hollow, nothing more than a collection of words that create an insatiable pit within us.

It’s our opportunity as beings to see the futility in identifying with concepts and find the place within that is infinite - and live from that place.

For me, this is never more clear than when I hear something that changes my perspective.

In an instant, how I view a situation, a person, or life completely shifts.

And that means my reality has shifted.

The shifts change how I relate to life and what’s in front of me.

They change my whole story.

Things become interesting when you stop accepting things as truth and start asking questions:

What’s my story?
Where’d it come from?
How is my story helping me?
How is my story hurting me?
When did I first learn that I needed to change myself to be accepted?

And most importantly…

Who am I without this story?
Without my story, what’s POSSIBLE for me in life?

These questions are deep and you’ll find your true Self emerging if you sit with them.

The fact that you are able to contemplate & question your stories shows that you are not them.

You are the being that is simply aware of them.

And with that awareness, you start to transform your story.