I went to dinner with my chatterbox cousin – and by chatterbox I mean a guy who will not stop talking … for hours. He’s exhausting, but his heart is (mostly) in the right place, so I feel obliged to meet him now and then.
For some reason, this time he started off on some ancient family history, such as his father being asked to stay back and work in India for the family when he had wanted to go abroad. Now, I’ve heard this story from my mom too, but a different version, one in which this uncle made a choice and benefited from the deal. And this story, and which version you believe, has been the cause of some family dynamics which apparently have carried forward into our generation too.
Similarly, this cousin had a view about sex in the 1930s when my grandmother was a young woman and how willing or unwilling a person might have been – it had never occurred to him (or he didn’t want to dwell on the possibility) that a woman at that time might not have wanted to have the sex that led to the birth of seven children – which contrasted with what my mother had told me, and my grandmother too.
I don’t know why – since this is not some earthshattering point – but this dynamic brought home to me how we each have our own narratives and they are just that, the stories we tell ourselves about why our lives are the way they are. And someone else might have a completely different narrative about the same thing. But some narratives are so foundational to who we are that we are unwilling to let go of them despite the appearance of counter-narratives.
My mother is having a clash with her sister about narrative related to their mother – and her alleged favouritism. Now that our parents age cohort is officially old, the traumas of their own childhoods are emerging raw and bloody for what they are, unsheated from the various irrational behavior it is often channeled into. My mother has her version of events, her sister another, both their versions coloured by their respective experiences, the truth somewhere in between.
I’ve begun to look at a lot of what people – and what I say too – in terms of narratives these days. And it allows me to take a more circumspect view than if I took people’s statements simply at face value. As people repeat certain stories or points of view on certain events, it becomes apparent that these stories/points of view are not so much true but extremely important to their sense of self.
And I’m obviously not immune to this. Perhaps I’ve been thinking more along these lines because I took this test (be warned, if you decide to do it, it’s free but you need to give your email address at the end to get your results and they’ll send you emails with some insights every week or so) and it brought home to me something about myself and how I see the world.
It’s not even something new, but it crystalised for me how core this particular narrative has become to my sense of self. It would be interesting to discover how I developed this world view, and I’m not even ready to shake it off yet, but is admittedly an exhausting way to live.
Understanding people’s core narratives helps one understand them better. It might also explain why one gets very rabid reactions from people on certain issues – when one is touching/shaking a core narrative. Sometimes one can see how that narrative is not serving a person, but also, that because it has become to central to the person’s identity, they are unable to let of it.
In fact, most things are not fact, but narrative, some more convincing than others, some that have outlived their purpose. But even with one’s closest of friends, it is very dangerous to try and tamper with a core narrative. Even an attempt at such a thing could break a friendship.
Since I’m too cheap/obsessed with saving at this point to pay for therapy, I might try to shrink myself. I might ask myself:
- What are my core narratives of myself?
- Have any of these been shaken? What happened?
- What are other people’s counter-narratives to mine (This might actually be counter-productive for me. I’m so adept at seeing other people’s points of view that sometimes I lose sight of my own. I might even be guilty of taking on a significant other’s counter-narrative of myself entirely. Now there’s an idea.)
- Would it benefit me to shift some of these narratives?
- Or rather, would it benefit me to return to my own narrative of myself – if I can begin to remember what that was?
for whom the bell tolls 
Yes the core narrative is so imp! and you’ll see people who have what i call narrativitis, where tehy keep changing narratives of events to not disturb a core narrative, usually “i am a good person”
hehe, it’s possible we all do this ya, though probably more subtly. It’s surprised me recently to realise how even people who I wouldn’t have expected to think it important to believe they are good people do. I think “I am a good person” is probably a core narrative that’s almost universal.