Living Beyond the Stories That Keep You Stuck
A client recently said to me, with a mix of resignation and clarity, “This is just how my life goes. I’m always suffering.”
What stood out to me wasn’t the content of what they were describing. As a depth-oriented therapist, content is rarely the most essential part. What mattered was the certainty embedded in the statement—the quiet finality of it. The story had already been written. And from within that story, there was very little room for hope, curiosity, or the possibility that something different could emerge.
When a story becomes this settled, it doesn’t just describe experience—it shapes it. It organizes perception, narrows expectation, and subtly dictates what feels possible. From inside that narrative, life is no longer unfolding; it is being confirmed.
A significant part of psychotherapy involves clarifying and deeply understanding the stories we tell ourselves—the core narratives that shape how we interpret the world around us. Most of us are so identified with our stories that we don’t recognize them as stories at all. They operate in the background, like apps on our phones that aren’t fully shut down. When we’re unaware of them, our unconscious beliefs shape our perceptions, emotions, and behavior.
A central task of psychotherapy is helping people become aware of these repetitive, often unexamined narratives—especially the ones that once helped us survive but now keep us constrained.
When a Story Becomes Identity
If, every time something challenging happens, the story you tell yourself is that you are a loser, broken, deeply flawed, or incapable of catching a break, you are likely living inside a victim narrative. In this story, life happens to you. Your power is obscured—often repressed or out of view—and you experience yourself as fundamentally at the mercy of circumstances.
If, on the other hand, each challenge is interpreted as something to grow through or learn from, a very different story emerges. In this narrative, difficulty is not evidence of defectiveness, but part of a life that includes resilience, adaptability, and capacity.
Whatever story you tell yourself, you are right—not because it is objectively true, but because it becomes the world you live inside.
The Difference Between Story and Reality
The stories we tell ourselves feel like truth—not because they are objectively accurate, but because they once kept us emotionally safe. Traumatic experiences leave imprints on our nervous systems. We must make meaning from what happens to us, and the stories we form help us survive experiences that once felt overwhelming, confusing, or senseless.
Over time, without questioning, these interpretations can harden into certainty. And certainty is compelling. It feels stabilizing. Predictable. Familiar.
But a story is not the same thing as reality. A story is an interpretation—one shaped by context, relationships, and timing. Reality is far more complex and far less fixed than the narratives we come to rely on. When we confuse the two, we stop engaging with life as it unfolds and begin living inside a script written long ago.
Updating a story requires tolerating anxiety. It requires loosening anxiety’s well-worn narratives and learning to sit with uncertainty. For many people—especially those with histories of trauma—certainty, even painful certainty, feels safer than openness. The familiar story may be limiting, but it is known.
Living in the Present Through the Lens of the Past
Without awareness, we relate to the present as if it were the past. Our bodies respond before our minds catch up. We assume intention where there may be none, rejection where there may simply be difference, danger where there may actually be acceptance.
And because we act from old expectations, we often evoke the very responses we fear—confirming the story and reinforcing its authority over us.
This process is largely unconscious. We are not choosing these stories; they feel as though they have always been true. Our interpretive frameworks shape how we listen, what we notice, what we dismiss, and how we understand others’ behavior.
Two people can experience the same moment and walk away with entirely different realities—not because one is right and the other is wrong, but because each is filtering experience through a different internal lens.
When a story goes unexamined, it becomes self-sealing. Evidence to the contrary is minimized or explained away, while anything that fits is amplified. The ego-mind remains loyal to the narrative because it believes it is protecting us.
How These Stories Are Formed
These stories are not created in a vacuum. The world we grew up in provided the scaffolding for how our minds learned to make meaning. We interpret the present through the lens of the past.
Trauma, in particular, shapes belief systems. When painful or overwhelming experiences occur without attuned others to help us make sense of them, our minds turn inward to create explanations on their own.
This inward turn can resemble a wounded narcissistic state—not narcissism in the colloquial sense, but a self-centeredness born of injury. The psyche becomes organized around suffering. This can show up as depression or anxiety, a sense of being uniquely flawed, or a painful combination of entitlement and helplessness.
For example, when parents divorce, it is common for children to unconsciously believe they caused it. Without someone to help them understand otherwise, that belief can persist into adulthood. Many people then live with chronic over-responsibility or excessive guilt, unconsciously sabotaging movement toward greater freedom or happiness.
As Gabor Maté writes, “We create the world with our minds, but first, the world creates our mind.”
If we grew up in an unsafe environment—where we had to navigate life alone or could not rely on others—we may come to experience people as unreliable or untrustworthy. Often, we never give others the chance to disconfirm this belief.
The ego protects itself by refusing to test its own hypotheses. We predict outcomes to feel safe. And very often, we unconsciously behave in ways that make those predictions come true.
Are You Stuck — Or Is the Lens No Longer Helpful?
Are you stuck—or is the lens you are looking through no longer serving you?
What story are you telling yourself?
What story might free you rather than confine you?
No one is truly stuck. “Stuckness” is often rooted in an unhelpful belief system—one that goes unquestioned. When we cling tightly to our stories, we never give ourselves the chance to transcend them.
Core Stories We Often Over-Identify With
Some familiar core stories include:
“I’m a burden” — often rooted in experiences of abandonment
“I’m too much” — when caregivers could not attune accurately
“I’m not enough” — when our experience was not consistently validated
“I’m broken” — when self-worth becomes dependent on external feedback
These stories are distortions. They are not accurate reflections of who we are, but adaptations shaped by wounds. Trauma alters the nervous system, and without awareness, we respond to the past rather than the present.
Clinging to these stories keeps us tethered to what has already happened. Recognizing their distortions creates the possibility of freedom.
Stories in Relationship
Many relationship conflicts arise from the collision of activated core stories. Two people can be in the same situation and have entirely different experiences. A couple may fight and later, through repair, discover that each partner interpreted the same moment in radically different ways.
This is why psychodynamic therapists are deeply curious about a client’s internal experience. We listen for perception, meaning, and emotional reality—not assuming that our interpretation is the client’s truth.
Learning about our own interpretations—and allowing space for another’s—creates intimacy with ourselves and, ultimately, with others.
Unexamined stories often sound like:
They don’t really love me.
I have to be who others want me to be.
I have nothing to offer.
I’m not smart enough, attractive enough, or strong enough.
These stories function like psychological comfort blankets—familiar, predictable, and deeply limiting.
When the Story Becomes Limiting
Our minds create stories to make sense of a world that can feel chaotic. When those stories fail to evolve, they become constraining. What was once adaptive becomes restrictive.
Signs a story may be outdated include:
Repetitive relationship patterns
Intense emotional reactivity
Chronic self-doubt
Persistent anxiety or hypervigilance
Many of these patterns are associated with complex trauma, where the world feels fundamentally unsafe and reliance on others feels threatening.
Therapy as a Place to Gently Re-Examine the Story
Therapy is not about positive thinking or reframing pain away. An overemphasis on positivity can become another form of avoidance. Healing requires slowing down and examining the deeper narratives that organize our inner lives.
Trauma-informed, psychodynamic psychotherapy looks beneath symptoms to understand how beliefs, relationships, and early experiences shaped the internal world. Developing safety with a therapist takes time, but it allows for the careful examination of the filters through which we experience ourselves and others.
Many people enter therapy carrying a hidden belief that they are broken. They unknowingly live out scripts that confirm this belief, replaying familiar roles to make the outside world match the inside.
No one is broken. But examining the belief itself can become a powerful place of inquiry.
Psychotherapy is not about becoming fixed. It is about understanding why you came to believe you were broken in the first place. When those beliefs are examined at the root, something loosens—creating more internal freedom, more space, and more ease.
If you find yourself living inside a story that no longer feels true—or no longer feels kind—therapy can offer a place to explore how that story was shaped and whether it still belongs.
If this resonates and you’d like to venture deeper, I offer trauma-informed, psychodynamic therapy in Oakland and online throughout California. Reach out today to schedule a free phone consultation.
