If you don’t like your story, can you create a new one?

For most of my life, I have struggled intermittently with depression (the Noonday Demon), and anxiety (its Accomplice). And in my practice to become more present, I have been trying to better understand, recognize and articulate strong negative emotions that come up for me from time to time, and which sometimes propel me into depression, and often keep me from being truly present in that magical state of simultaneous awareness and relaxation.

Here’s a table I recently constructed to categorize these negative emotions and how I’m learning to deal with them:

I’ve focused most of my attention on dealing with the first three categories, since the avoidance strategies for them (shown in the fourth column above) are mostly ineffective — these things are happening, and are going to happen, no matter how I try to avoid them, or try to avoid knowing about them. I think I’ve made good progress on these, with the coping strategies shown in the right-hand column of the chart.

These strategies are fairly simple self-awareness and self-management techniques. They don’t require me to change myself, or others, or the world.

Recently, a friend said to me, “What if you turned that third statement around? What if what’s really up with you, Mr. Idealist, is that other people are constantly letting you down? Maybe it’s just easier for you, as a believer in people’s basic goodness and good intentions, to take the fall when things go wrong.”

This got me thinking about whether (and when) the ’stories’ I’ve been telling myself in categories 3-5 are true, and, if/when they’re not, what is the true ‘New Story’ I should be telling myself instead when these anxiety-provoking triggers occur? So, using the turn-around statement above, my New Story for category 3 situations might be:

This person’s claim to be disappointed or let down by me is unwarranted. Their expectations are not what I clearly offered or agreed to. Their disappointment is their stuff, a gap that they created in their mind/heart, not one I created or am responsible for. I’m actually disappointed in them, that they are laying this on me, unfairly and unreasonably.

Assuming this is supportable (there are times when I have created expectations that I haven’t lived up to, though I am learning not to do this), then this becomes a category 2 trigger instead of a category 3 trigger. Instead of being filled with anxiety, hurt and self-hatred, it is more appropriate for me in these situations to feel outrage, but to use the coping mechanisms in the final column for category 2: self-manage my own feelings, understand and be generous about the accuser’s unreasonable behaviour, assess whether it came about because of some systemic but rectifiable failure (e.g. poor communication processes), and put it back to them that their behaviour and/or action was unreasonable, and why, and then just let it go. Not easy, but much better than trying to cope with feelings of self-hatred for something I didn’t do.

At the same time, I have to take care not to over-promise, which is hard to avoid when you want everyone to be happy with you. I am slowly learning this. The hardest part is avoiding the implicit (unstated) promise that can be inferred when I don’t say explicitly what I will and what I won’t do, so that I anticipate and prevent possible disappointments through clear, unambiguous communication. Such communications can produce immediate expressions of disappointment (”I didn’t think you planned to do that, I thought you were going to do this”), and it’s a real temptation to avoid them when that possibility exists, but such avoidance is really not much better than a lie, a lie of omission. I’m learning that someone’s disappointment with my intentions is much easier to deal with than later disappointment with me because of their unreasonable (but unchallenged) expectations about my actions (i.e. what I have or haven’t done).

Then I wondered whether the other contributor to this trigger — my propensity to procrastinate — might need a similar “New Story”. I view procrastination as an exemplar of Pollard’s Law — we do what we must (our personal imperatives), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. To the procrastinator, doing “what we must” means doing it only when we have to, when there’s no time left to do anything else. I’ve stopped giving myself (and others) a hard time for procrastinating, because I think it’s human nature. If it’s really a matter of over-promising, then I have to learn not to promise what I can’t deliver. But most of the time it’s just procrastination, and if people have issues because I leave things until the last minute, that’s their problem, not mine.

The final three categories of triggers are all fear/anxiety triggers, and they include:

• situations of actual or possible danger e.g. bad weather (especially when driving), and situations of actual or possible physical discomfort e.g. cold, wet, illness, pain
• situations of actual or possible psychological or social discomfort e.g. where there is pressure to interact socially with people I don’t know or particularly like (I feel trapped and miserable)
• situations of actual or possible personal failure e.g. missing important deadlines, dropping the ball while juggling a lot of things at once, forgetting something important

In all these situations, I anticipate an outcome full of suffering, and lack any workable coping strategy, so I have just tried to avoid them. As a consequence, I’ve become a very fearful person, and the related anxieties often lead (when they endure for any period of time, or are given credence by circumstances) to serious bouts of depression.

In thinking about these, it seems to me there is a six-part possible coping strategy (there are other strategies that work for some people, like desensitizing oneself to these fears, but they don’t seem to work well for me):

What then are the New Stories to tell myself instead of “Look out: major suffering ahead”, when these situations arise?

In a few cases, these situations were preventable, and in those cases, the story I should tell myself is similar to the one I am now telling myself when others criticize me for valid reasons: “I need to learn from this experience so it won’t happen again”.

In most cases, however, these situations are not preventable, predictable or controllable, and in those cases, the story I should tell myself is one of self-compassion and dispassion:

• For situations of real/possible danger, physical discomfort, or failure, the story is: “This sucks. I feel bad. Oh well, I just need to do my best, it will pass, no point getting upset about it.”
• For situations of social/psychological discomfort, the story is: “I care about most people, I just don’t care about most people’s stuff. Oh, well, don’t beat myself up over that, I just need to find the people I care most about and bide my time with them until this is over.”

With these New Stories and additional coping strategies, my trigger chart looks very different:

There’s a lot new here, and I’m still thinking it through. But I realize that, while I’m moving forward in becoming more present in the face of the world’s unbearable suffering, and the violence and other misbehaviour of our human species, I still have much to learn in coping with external criticism and with my deep-seated fears. Maybe by changing my stories that provoke negative emotions, and by changing my coping strategies, I will get better at this. I’m not sure that this isn’t just a rationalization or wishful thinking, however: If I’m really coming to self-acceptance, can I really change those stories or strategies? Is this less anxious, less fearful, less self-hating person really me? Or do I really need to come to acknowledge and accept who I am, now, the person represented by the upper table, not the lower one?

One way or the other, I think the answer to these questions is emerging. And once I have them, perhaps I’ll finally be ready, after more than a year of reflection and “down time”, to discover what I’m meant to do with the rest of my life.