While I’m a psychotherapist specializing in working with kids, I also see a lot of adolescents and adults. The work is actually very similar regardless of the age of my client: we’re always focusing on understanding our own childhood narratives and how the unhealthy ones cause problems.
With this in mind, I want to include a post not about helping your child, but about helping you! If you have your own childhood narratives that are getting in your way and which you’d like to change, this post tells you how.
Let’s start by looking at how these unhealthy narratives got there in the first place.
Unhealthy narratives weren’t always unhealthy
Many unhealthy narratives originate from painful childhood experiences. (Here, it might be helpful to review the key post, “Childhood Narratives: How They Impact Kids for a Lifetime.”)
For example, as a young child, if your parents don’t show up for you, if their love is unreliable and often lacking, you’ll probably develop a narrative along the lines of the people closest to me often leave me. There may be other narratives that accompany this one, such as separation leads to abandonment or don’t get too close to others.
To illustrate it:
becomes
As a child, these narratives aren’t necessarily unhealthy; in fact, they’re meant to be helpful. After all, if you know in your heart that people will leave you, then perhaps you can do things to keep them close. Or you can prepare yourself for their abandonment.
These narratives—and the behaviors they produce—help you survive. You rely on them because they are useful and they feel true.
When you become an adult, these narratives remain very active, but now the players are different.
And there’s the catch: we expect people in the present day to act the same as people in our past.
For example, as you develop an intimate relationship with a partner, the childhood narrative you carry in your heart can radically influence your behavior.
Because your narrative tells you that your partner will abandon you, you might hold on to them very tightly. You might furtively read their texts or demand to know where they are at all times and who they’re talking to.
As an adult, your head—that logical, thinking part of you—might recognize that these behaviors are going to cause problems, but your heart—the emotional part of you—is too flooded with emotions to let you act rationally.
You could say that your head and heart are having a fight, and your heart is winning.
There’s an unfortunate irony in all this: by gripping your partner so tightly, you’ll likely cause them to flee your stranglehold which, in turn, only reinforces your initial childhood narrative that people will abandon you.
The childhood narrative which had initially been helpful and adaptive has now become unhealthy and harmful.
How to change these unhealthy narratives
On the face of it, changing these narratives seems fairly logical and simple:
1 Begin by identifying and understanding your own childhood narrative.
2 Identify the feelings that accompany the narrative and which cause you to make unhealthy decisions.
3 Get your head (the logical part of you) to talk to your heart (the feeling part of you).
4 Act on your thoughts, not your feelings or the old narrative.
5 Repeat again and again until your heart doesn’t believe anymore in the childhood narrative.
The reality is, these five steps are hard, so let’s look at them more closely.
Step 1: Identifying and understanding the childhood narrative
Identifying your own narratives is difficult, though it can be greatly facilitated by an objective person (like a therapist). Consider what things trigger you and how those triggers are related to your early childhood experiences. This can take a bit of soul searching, and it can be painful when it brings up old, emotional injuries.
Step 2: Identifying the feelings & Step 3: Head/heart communication
Sitting with those feelings can be painful—sometimes it’s helpful to share those feelings with someone you trust—but it’s a necessary step in helping your head talk to your heart (Step 3). For your head to effectively talk to your heart, your head has to speak directly to how your heart is feeling. (For more on this, see the post, “Head vs. Heart: Growing a Neck.”)
Just as you name emotions for your child, your head has to
1) voice the emotions your heart is feeling, then
2) name the source of these feelings.
Only after your head speaks to how your heart feels can it approach your heart intellectually by
3) adding some logic and supporting data to the mix.
It could sound like this:
“Hey Heart, I know you’re scared your partner is going to leave you [naming the feeling] just like the times your dad went out of town for a month at a time, or when your mom was too depressed for weeks to show up for you when you needed it. [naming the source] That sucked and hurt. [adding a little compassion!] But your partner loves you, shows up for you, and isn’t like your parents one bit. [adding logic and data] You don’t have to be scared this time. [returning to the core message]”
Step 4: Acting on your thoughts, not the feelings and old, unhealthy narratives
If your head gets in the game and speaks effectively to your heart, your heart will give in and listen to your head. Rather than sneaking your partner’s phone to read their texts (what your heart wants to do), your heart trusts that your head is right: you don’t have to be worried because the old narrative no longer applies.
However, expect some anxiety to come with all this.
When your head starts running the show, it’s interfering with all those years of coping skills and behaviors that your heart has used to manage its fears. Now, when your head convinces you not to check your partner’s phone, your heart screams even louder: “You have to check those texts, otherwise you’ll never know what’s going on!”
This is a key stage in changing narratives. It’s an anxiety hump that you have to get over. It’s new territory for your heart, and your heart is going to be scared. And that’s okay. If you can tolerate the anxiety, your heart can start learning a new narrative based on new experiences: some people can be trusted not to leave.
Step 5: Rinse and repeat
Change comes slowly—years slowly. Especially if you’ve spent the last decade or two or three believing and acting upon a childhood narrative.
Be patient with yourself. Expect times when your heart wins out or your head checks out.
Just keep working on getting your head in the game. Like exercising, the more you do it, the easier it gets, and the stronger you will become.
Related Posts
Childhood Narratives: How They Impact Kids for a Lifetime
Narratives are one of the most important things parents need to know about a child’s psychology. This post will tell you what they are and how they work.
Head vs. Heart: Growing a Neck
Good mental health starts with strong communication between your head (your thinking) and your heart (your feelings). Here’s how.
How to Manage Emotional Triggers in 5 Steps
Emotional triggers can revive painful childhood experiences so that we unknowingly over-react and make poor choices in the present. Here’s how to manage those triggers.
How To Prevent Harmful Narratives in Your Child
It’s not hard to undo harmful narratives in children. Here are specific strategies to help kids form lasting, healthy narratives.
Naming Emotions: a Key Part of Successful Parenting
Naming emotions for a child not only builds emotional intelligence and self-esteem, it improves the child’s behavior. Here’s how it’s done.
The Most Common Harmful Narratives in Children
A list of common harmful narratives children develop, why they develop these narratives, and how you can keep the narratives from forming.
3 thoughts on “How to Change Your Own Unhealthy Narratives”
Never considered that these narratives that are making my life really hard right now were actually helpful when I was a child. It sounds so twisted! But it makes sense too, and it actually helps to think of it this way. My childhood narratives were good things back then, but now they get in the way. I wish it wasn’t so hard to break old habits. Thanks for this post!
Hi Zack,
Glad this post was helpful. Old habits really are hard to break but being aware of the habit (or narrative) is the first really important step in letting go of the old narrative. Keep at it. It takes time, persistence, and continued checking in with yourself.
Thanks for this. Its helpful especially with how my head and heart can communicate with each other, like two parts of me having a discussion. For me, I’ve always followed my heart because my feelings are so intense. My head has never really talked to my heart because it never really knew how. Now it makes sense that if my head is going to talk some sense to my heart, it has to talk to why I’m feeling the way I do and where those feelings come from.