Have you heard the saying, “there are two sides to every story?” One of my students corrected me the other day. He informed me that there are at least three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth. I believe he was right.
Embracing the Story
Our memories are the stories we tell ourselves. These are stories of success and failure. They are stories of connection, compassion, guilt, and fear. Many of us rely on our memories to determine what we deserve to receive and what we are capable of accomplishing.
The way we interpret our stories is important because it can impact how we see ourselves and others. As we look back, we can reinterpret the meaning of our stories from where we are now.
Fictional Stories
It’s interesting to think about how we make memories. We typically believe that the way we experience an event and later recall that event is how it actually happened. Science tells us that’s not true.
Elizabeth Loftus is well-known for her research on false memories. She has learned that false memories are easily planted by asking questions or retelling events in a certain way. Loftus started asking questions with highly emotional words to see if that would change the person’s response. Guess what? It did. She also found out that sometimes counseling unintentionally plants false memories by asking leading questions.
That’s significant for all of us because we have conversations with ourselves about our past. Each time we retell the story, it tends to change slightly. When we tell the story to someone else, we might add a little here or leave out this little part over there. Knowing that we are all human, and prone to these same tendencies, this leads to the conclusion that some of our memories might be false memories. Honestly, I’m starting to believe that part of what we think we remember is fiction.
Interpreting the Story
Remember that everything is filtered through our expectations, previous experiences, and our current state of mind. That means our filters dictate what makes it into awareness and how we understand that information. If you are looking for people to be kind and compassionate, that is what you will tend to find.
It’s as if you have on special glasses that filter out the things you are not looking for and magnify the things you are looking for. Now, this doesn’t mean that everyone suddenly becomes kind and compassionate. What it means is that you are more likely to notice the nice things that people do, rather than focusing on the negative.
Our memories are just the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and how we came to be who we are. In the end, whether the memory is true or false, all of our memories combine to create the story of who we are and how we function in the world.
Editing the Story
That’s good news because it means that you control how you interpret the story of your past and create the story of your future. It’s time to let go of past stories that don’t serve your current and future goals. Sometimes that means you have to learn a lesson from that experience. Maybe it happened to teach you something about yourself or someone else, or about the world in general. Sometimes it means you have to practice forgiveness in order to move on. Whatever you need to do, letting the past hold you back is much worse than facing the past and reinterpreting it from your current position.
