I Hate Myself So You Hate Me Too
You are the stories you tell yourself
It was a frozen New Year’s Eve in Northern Ontario. It was the early 90’s and I was (poorly) dancing the night away to what were top hits and are now old classics. Tom Cochrane’s Life is a Highway was playing as the clock struck midnight. The title of the song seems like a worthwhile metaphor to torture while I try to make my point.
“Life's like a road that you travel on
When there's one day here, and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind”
Mile after mile unfolds, with most being indistinguishable from the other. From time to time, the monotony is broken up by memorable moments shared with those who are on the journey with us. Some are happy, some are sad, and some are downright traumatic. We often remember exactly where we were when they happened.
March 26, 2010 was the day Cindy took her life. That day is an important mile marker in my life. It’s become an anchoring point. I tend to think of my life in terms of what came before that day and what came after. At times it seems I’ve lived two separate lives. It’s not that I became a different person overnight; far from it. It’s because Cindy’s death was a significant emotional event that changed the trajectory of my life.
An event like the death of a loved one is frozen in time while in every other way time marches on. As has passed, and I continue to change, I notice the stories I tell myself and others about the same event change over time. Sometimes I reinterpret the same event in a different way. Other times I focus on different aspects of my experience. Sometimes I wonder how much of what I remember is true at all.
The common thread that runs through each of those scenarios is they’re based on stories. Human beings are masterful storytellers, especially when our audience is ourselves. Every one of us tells ourselves stories all day long. It’s such a fundamental part of what makes us human that most of us don’t realize we’re doing it.
Some Pop Psychology
I’m not a psychologist so I won’t attempt to give a full explanation of why we do it. Let me summarize it this way: We’re always trying to make sense of our experience. We have much more information coming at us than our brains could ever hope to process. To manage it, we look for patterns to match to help us process more information more quickly. In other words, we access pre-defined stories about what we’re experiencing.
Imagine you’ve been mugged walking alone at night. In the future, you’ll be more likely to associate walking at night or walking in a certain neighbourhood with danger. Someone else who hasn’t shared your traumatic experience might not think twice about it. Some might think you’re crazy for letting a random event influence your future behavior.
Or, imagine a previous boss sends you an email to come and see her, and when you do, she fires you on the spot. When your next boss sends you a similar email, you’ll be more likely to react with fear or anxiety. Why? You’re looking for patterns based on your previous experience so you can fill in the gaps in your knowledge. You don’t know why she sent the email so you invent a story to complete the picture in your mind. Our brains hate incomplete pictures.
This behaviour has been critical for our survival as a species. Associating certain noises, smells, situations with danger is how we’ve managed to make it this far.
What’s kept us alive can also hinder our ability to heal from loss and lead a meaningful and fulfilling life. The stories we tell ourselves in our head are powerful and guide our actions and reactions in the real world.
You might be reading this and thinking, “WTF is this guy talking about? I don’t do that.” I hope by the time you get to the end, I’ve convinced you otherwise.
We run into problems when we confuse the stories we tell ourselves with objective facts. We’re less likely to question an idea we’ve labelled as a fact. The sun rises in the east…fact. The earth’s surface is covered with more water than land…fact. He asked me that question that way because he thinks I’m a fucking idiot…fact. Wrong. It’s a story.
If you’ve ever been in a relationship with someone, you’ve had experiences like this: You make a statement or ask a question and the other person interprets your meaning or motivation very differently from what you meant. They look at your words, tone, body language or timing and make up a story in their head about what you are “really trying to say.”
Here’s where it gets even more real. What we think about most has this weird way of coming true. Our beliefs impact how we interact with the world which impacts how the world interacts with us. It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. And we all do it.
I Hate Myself So You Hate Me Too
A woman I used to work with asked me to have a coffee. She wanted to talk about the problems she was having with her team. She told me her team had “rejected” her. I knew and liked the people on her team and found it hard to believe they would reject a teammate.
We talked and I found myself thinking she probably had serious self-esteem issues. I asked her about it, and she opened up about her life. She shared how much she struggles with her sense of self-worth, childhood trauma, abandonment, crappy marriage, weight problems etc. For her, rejection was a primal fear.
Here's how it played out. She didn’t engage with her team because she was so afraid of being rejected. One of our biggest fears is having someone else confirm our shitty beliefs about ourselves. She wasn’t contributing to the team because she was terrified of her contribution being rejected or dismissed. In her mind, rejecting her ideas meant rejecting her as a person. The risk was too big to take. Her behavior made perfect sense to her in the context of the stories she told herself.
At first, her team tried to engage with her. After being repeatedly being stonewalled, they gave up. Of course, she took their giving up as just another rejection. She manufactured evidence to confirm what she already believed. She turned the stories she was telling herself into facts without questioning them.
In other words, she was fucked either way. She could only end up feeling the rejection that she was trying to avoid. She doomed herself to this outcome and it all stemmed from the stories she was telling herself. It all began with her. It always begins with us.
What Does Any of This Have to Do with Grief?
It has everything to do with grief.
For the first 4 years after Cindy’s death, I was masking the pain with booze, pot and cigarettes. It’s obvious to me now that I was punishing myself because I couldn’t save her and had failed so many times as a husband.
The stories I told others mirrored the stories I told myself. They always do. When I’d tell people how hard my experience was I made my past sound horrific and my present sound perfect. I wanted people to see me as a hero. The bigger the dichotomy between past and present, the bigger the hero I became.
I needed people to validate how hard things had been for me, how well I’d handled it and how quickly I’d emerged back on top.
In other words, I was a fucking victim.
Strike 1
I was trying to forgive myself and I using other people’s words to help me do it. It didn’t work. Forgiveness comes from the inside out. As I’m writing this, I find myself wondering if I have truly forgiven myself for some of the things that happened. The feeling I’m having in my body right now tells me I haven’t.
Strike 2
I was also trying to rationalize my addictions. After all, anyone who had been this heroic was entitled to a few drinks from time to time. Right? I’d tell myself that if I was able to come through this experience like such a champ, maybe other people should drink more too. That didn’t work either.
Strike 3
Ironically, at the same time, I was reinforcing my own victimhood I knew I wanted to quit drinking. But I couldn’t. I’d tried to quit a million times and failed. I was a fucking slave, and I knew it. Painting my story in the most tragic light possible was an attempt to excuse what I was doing. Once again, that didn’t work.
If you’re keeping score, that’s zero for three.
Putting Down the Bottle
August 30, 2014 was another important mile marker in my life. I stopped drinking. In retrospect, it was the most important decision I’ve made since Cindy’s death. It wasn’t one I made alone. It allowed me to start healing.
In the interest of full transparency, that wasn’t the end of my struggle with addiction. It was just the end of the struggle with the one that was fucking up my life the most.
Being free from alcohol created the space to start grieving. 5 fucking years after Cindy’s death. Grieving is growing. I found myself becoming much more curious about myself. I started wondering if sharing a more real version of my story could help people. I figured there must be other people struggling to deal with the tough shit in their lives.
I started talking to people about loss and addiction by sharing my story with them. It turns out we’re surrounded by people just waiting for someone to go first. I started having some of the most meaningful conversations of my life in places where I least expected it; like standing behind a 1500-ton press in an automotive manufacturing plant. Those conversations helped me learn more about myself and others at the same time. It became obvious to me that my shittiest experiences could be a source of immense contribution.
I noticed my inner narrative starting to change. I focused less on the tragic aspects and more on thinking about how I could use my experiences and what I was learning to help people. I was also starting to like myself a hell of a lot more. Cindy’s suicide was still tragic to me. It was also crucial part in my slowly becoming a better human being. I was better because she had died.
Time passed and I found myself feeling guilty about my awesome new life. The version of me Cindy knew couldn’t save her. I’d failed at that. I wondered often if this improved version of me would have been able safe her life. I suspect the answer is no, but it’s a question that will never be answered. Loss leaves so many unanswerable questions and a lot of time think about them. It took me quite some time to be comfortable just living in the question.
For a few years, I wrestled with the idea that something can be a both a tragedy and a gift at the same time. I learned those ideas can co-exist and allowing them to co-exist is crucial to healing. That version of the story helped me remember Cindy in a much better light. She gave me a life-changing gift. I’m doing what I’m doing today because of her death. I have a responsibility to carry what she gave me forward.
13ish years later I’d say I’m generally more Zen about it all. I’m no monk who has freed himself from all attachment while meditating in a cave. But I’ve realized that ultimately, her death is just something that happened and everything else is a story I make up about it.
There are times where I tell myself stories that are painful. There are times I tell myself stories that are beautiful. And others that are benign. Maybe one day I won’t tell myself stories at all. Who knows?
What happened hasn’t changed. I have changed. Every phase of my evolution has either started with or resulted in me telling myself a new story. Sometimes it’s changing a few words in the script and others it’s crumpling the whole thing into a ball and starting fresh
The Lesson
If you’re still with me, here’s the lesson:
One of the greatest gifts bestowed on us by our creator, be that God or the Universe or someone/thing else, we are powerful.
“We have the power to choose the stories we tell about what happened to us, what’s happening to us and what we’d most love to happen in the future.”
Think about what it could mean for you if you allowed yourself to truly believe it.
YOU and you alone have the power to choose the stories you tell.
I find that immensely inspiring and empowering. What we focus on grows. We move towards the images we most persistently hold in our minds.
Don’t be fooled into thinking any of this is easy. It might be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. You might need help. You might want to give up. You might find deep comfort in holding onto thoughts or beliefs you know are fucking up your life.
That makes you human. And humans have the power to choose. No one can take that away from you.
Simple Tools to Try Right Now
1. When you find yourself making a judgement about an event, a person, or a situation, start your thought like this:
“The story I’m telling myself is….”
You’ll notice yourself being more willing question the story you’re telling yourself.
You’ll become less reactive when dealing with other people
You’ll be more likely to peel back the onion and look at your underlying beliefs, assumptions, and judgements.
You’ll be more able to craft a different, more effective story
2. Go First. It’s literally that simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. Drop the mask and stop pretending you have your shit together. You’re surrounded by people who desperately want to be loved for who they really are. Just like you. Share more of your background, your struggles, your fears, your strengths, and your dreams.
Realizing you’re not alone and not that different from anyone else is a beautiful way to connect with people while changing the stories you tell yourself. After all, if you can be compassionate with someone else about what they’re dealing with, can’t you be compassionate with yourself? That too, is a choice.