The Stories We Tell Ourselves

A few years ago, I sat on the bleachers at my son’s baseball game on a warm spring day. I had one of my 9 month-old twins in tow and as we sat down, I recognized a friend from church. We both mothered many, and had always just had a bond that looked like waving enthusiastically at Mass and chatting afterwards for a few minutes until our kids’ patience expired.

So it was lovely to have many long innings before us to talk, and to play and feed cheerios to a happy baby between us. As we chatted the conversation turned to difficult stages of our kids, and then suddenly, the difficult pain of having emotionally unavailable mothers. In an instant, we were into a deep tête-à-tête, sharing wounds and nodding in understanding. Neither of us were stuck in a victim stage, both of us were accepting that our mothers were wounded themselves. But in comparing notes, we gained understanding about the impact it had on our lives, especially our roles as mothers, and found healing in sharing our stories, and the peace that comes from knowing you are not alone.

The season of Lent has just begun, and it’s helpful to remember that any progress in the spiritual life has to take an inventory of where we are at. We need to know our Point A to get to Point B. But I think the tricky thing with a mother wound, or any major needs that we had in a relationship that didn’t get met, is that the stories we tell ourselves might be so subtle, so woven into our views about ourselves and the other people in our lives, that it can be hard to really see them at work, halting our progress and sabotaging us.  We might not yet know that there is both the original trauma, and also the ways it compounds because of what we let the story become, the things we let it mean, the ways we let it define us.

The easiest way to spot them is to look for the flare ups. Look for the friction in our relationships. Our wounds have a way of surfacing when they get poked, so if we want to find the wounds we just need to see when they are playing defense. When we are angry, disappointed, persecuted, outraged, and frustrated.

I thought my mother wounds were all dealt with, and I had detached with love, and met my needs by mothering myself and looking to Mary for maternal guidance. But grief and healing is an ongoing process, it’s not linear. I had gone through many rounds of healing, but this Lent it is abundantly clear that I need to dive deep once again and find further healing.

What I learned from my friend that day on the bleachers was that there are other people out there with the same wounds. I am not alone. And we all have the power and the potential to heal. So this blog post is for anyone who has a trauma, maybe it’s a father wound, maybe it is abuse of another kind, to tell you that you are not alone, and you can heal. Lent is a great time to do this, because healing our wounds frees up more room in our heart to love God and others. It also feels incredibly freeing and life affirming. In loving our selves well we can love others well too. How do we do this? By diving deep into stories that are true and healing, and expose the ones we tell ourselves that are lies and damaging.

For me this has always come through books. It can be tricky to be a Catholic in the self-help world. Religion can be misused to manipulate and guilt people, because it has all the hallmarks of tribal thinking for unhealthy people. Not surprisingly, there can be a lot of rejection of religion and in turn replacing it with New Age practices or rugged individualism. It is understandable given the abuses that have happened in it’s name, but despite the evil or mental illness that lies underneath such abuse, truth and love are not only the essence of God, they are the essence of healing. God’s desire to heal us is the central message of his life, of the Gospels. My faith has helped me heal so much, and I have grown the most through the truths of the Catholic Church and its sacraments and tools like the Rosary, all of which point to turning deeply to prayer. The more I ask Him for healing the more I have found it.

Very often the healing that is the answers to those prayers have come from self-help books. The ones about healing a narcisstic mother wound helped me start my journey. I just listened to Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters and have come away with a much lighter heart after doing the exercises. And Brene Brown offers tremendous insight from anyone needing to heal from shame and feelings of worthlessness (spoiler alert: it is everyone) so any of her books are helpful. And most recently I have been diving into The Mindful Catholic by Dr. Gregory Bottaro which brilliantly marries the worlds of psychology and faith and is so dense with insights I will be working through it for a long time. Highly recommend.

This exercise from Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters has been eye opening for me so I will leave it here for you. It is finding the starting point – moments where we are hurting or agitated – and it follows that thread down to the stories we tell ourselves about it. Of course the wounds in us started with someone else’s woundedness, and they don’t need to be minimized, but the ongoing damage was unknowingly perpetuated by our subconscious mind repeating the untrue stories we told ourselves after being hurt. They weren’t there for me, so I must be someone who wasn’t worth it. Though this is geared towards healing from our mothers, I really think this excercise can be used to uncover wounds from anyone in our life.

I did this with two examples in my life, and the roots of shame, pain, and worthlessness revealed themselves in such a shocking way. I thought I was strong and confident, but the lingering brokenness from the stories I told myself was so clear and were totally at work in my life. It was amazing to see it and to let. them. go. 

Pick one example of a memory or interaction that causes you pain.

1.Write down as many uncensored details about this event – what she should have done, how your life would have been different if it hadn’t happened, etc…

2. Pare it down to the bare facts with no judgment i.e., My mother said ___. 

3. Ask yourself what you made it mean about you. Write it down.

4. When you think about what you wrote in step 3 how do you feel? 

5. List the things you do or don’t do when you feel that way.

6. Describe what your life looks like as a result. 

7. Sum up your story as briefly as you can. 

My mother (or friend, husband, sister, co-worker, boss) said:

I made it mean that I am:

There is a part of me that feels: () because ()

And when I think about that I feel:

And when I feel that way I:

As a result I:

The author writes that it is very important to forgive yourself for the things you told yourself about yourself that aren’t really true. In fact, she maintains that when you find this lie, this ugly untrue story, tell yourself the OPPOSITE story. She uses an example from Martha Beck’s book Diana, Awakening which is an allegory where Diana has experienced the most woundedness any of us could imagine. She is abandoned in a dumpster by her mother at birth and adopted by abusing parents. Understandably, she tells her self the story that she is garbage, unwanted, unworthy of love. But her guide tells her to tell herself the opposite story.

That in reality, She was infinitely worthy and beautiful and strong, and the people in her life were not capable of handling this or seeing this. They made the mistake of abandoning her, of devaluing her, but in the end she left them, because she knew she was capable of building a beautiful life full of joy and goodness.

It is so powerful to flip these scripts, and to consciously see the stories we tell ourselves. I hope this helps someone to find a starting path to healing if they need it. I am so grateful for mine, and look forward to where it will take me. It isn’t easy to share our hard stories, but when we do we will find we are not alone. And we find that if we are willing to work through the mess, to go through the Good Friday of our wounds, we find the beauty of the Resurrection.