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Self-Talk
What Stories Are You Telling Yourself Inside Your Head?
Our inner storyteller distorts all that we see. Stop believing the story.
Posted April 15, 2025 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
What’s the story you’re telling yourself inside your head—the story of your life, and about yourself?
Have you ever noticed that your mind is busy creating a narrative version of your life from the moment you get up in the morning to the moment you go to sleep—creating a thread-line between events, a cause-and-effect relationship between everything that happens?
Continually connecting the dots, your inner storyteller explains and interprets not only what's happening, but why it’s happening, what it means, and what it says about you and your future.
This might not be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that you might not recognize your story as a story—and most certainly, not as your personal story, your version of reality based on your individual history, wounds, conditioning and everything else you’ve ever lived.
We think that the movie playing inside our head, the one our inner narrator wrote, produced, directed, and stars in, is the only movie playing in town, and therefore, the movie everyone else is also watching and living in.
We imagine that the story we tell ourselves about who we are is who we are, and that the characters we’ve constructed for everyone else in our personal movie is who they are.
Our narrator constructs meanings and intentions for everything in our experience, and yet we believe, respond, and relate to others as if these self-constructed meanings and intentions are objective reality—the one and only Truth.
Simply put, we believe that our narrator’s version of reality is reality. So does everyone else: They also believe that their version of reality is reality. This makes for great difficulty in our relationships and everywhere else in our lives.
Sometimes our self-stories are positive; they help us "rewrite" difficult experiences and provide a helpful self-image. We need our stories to frame and make sense of life, to create meaning and generate resilience. Our narratives represent an important part of healthy self-esteem and help us structure and actualize our intentions.
The problem with our self-stories, however, is that when they're not helpful, they tend to keep us stuck in repetitive behaviors and beliefs, patterns that generate the same unsatisfying negative results again and again.
Our narratives often write a negative story about us, and then we set out into the world to find or create evidence for that story and, in so doing, make it true. The end result is that we don’t get what we want. Our self-stories, while helpful at times, can also imprison us in a Sisyphean life, rolling the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back to the bottom, and leaving us back where we started.
Notice the story you’re telling yourself inside your head and how you’re creating the link between your experiences: the this-happened-because-of-this threadline.
Notice where you're departing from the bare facts, the concrete reality, the it’s raining kind of reality, and where you enter the fictional part of the story: the it’s-raining-because-it’s-my-day-off-and-of-course-I’m-being-punished part of the story.
Notice how you're deciding what the facts mean and what they say about you and everyone else. That is, where your inner narrator begins adding onto the facts and shaping them for its own use—to fit its already-written narrative. Simultaneously, become aware of your assumption that your version of reality is reality, the inarguable truth for everyone
Take a closer look at the stories you tell yourself. It will change your life.
