Now’s The Time To Rewrite Your Childhood Stories

This month, Abi Normal News will be focused on the power of story-telling and how it affects our lives. One of the things that makes humans unique is our ability to tell stories. Story-telling may even be an evolutionary adaptation we developed as a way to survive and cooperate with other human beings.

The stories we absorb completely shape our reality. Isn’t it crazy that some of us begin listening to stories as babies before we can even speak?! As children, stories can impart amazing lessons and help us to understand how the world works.

We’d have a lot more constipated kids running around if it weren’t for Everyone Poops. Stories can also bring children joy. How fun is it to discover that a mystical tooth fairy takes your old teeth and gives you cold hard cash in return?

But there are also a couple of pitfalls with storytelling during childhood development. For one, stories are often used to control children’s behavior. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it can lead to unintended consequences down the road.

How many of us learned to be a “good” boy or girl when we were children only to have it bite us in the ass when we grew older? How many of us were told the story that life is fair (which is why we must treat others fairly), only to discover this is a bunch of crap? While there are certainly helpful stories we learn as children, we will also absorb unhelpful stories that hurt us.

The other pitfall with story-telling comes into play when children tell themselves stories. In psychology, there is something called Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. This theory goes through how kids develop their abilities to think and process information as they grow up.

In his research, Jean Piaget discovered that most children don’t have the ability to think abstractly until they are roughly 12 years old. What does that mean? Kids under the age of 12, on average, don’t understand symbolism or hypothetical stuff.

Can you see why this might be problematic? Stories are all about symbolism!! Children before this age take in these stories at face-value; they are concrete thinkers. And children also create stories to make sense of what is happening around them.

Sometimes the stories kids tell themselves are amazing. Like when a child finds a stick and decides it’s definitely a wizard’s wand and then proceeds to run around casting spells and scaring the cat half to death. How fun!

But other times, the stories children tell themselves can be tragic and leave deep wounds. Here is a heart-breaking but very real example. Maya Angelou was raped at the age of seven-and-a-half.

From her perspective, after she spoke his name aloud, her rapist was killed. She told herself the story that it was her voice that killed a man. This led her to stop speaking for five years out of fear that her voice was dangerous.

If we think about Piaget's theory, eight-year-old Maya didn’t have the abstract thinking available to her to understand the bigger context of what happened. How could she? It wasn’t until an adult (her teacher) helped her reframe her reality that she began to speak again.

Now let's think back on our own lives. How many stories did we absorb or create as children without their full context? And how many of these stories have we subconsciously carried with us into adulthood?

Some of you may be thinking, “God this is so depressing!” But the secret is that you sit squarely in the driverseat as the storyteller of your own life. Now that you’re an adult who DOES have the ability to think abstractly, you have the power to reevaluate the stories you grabbed onto when you were a child.

Now’s the time to rewrite your childhood stories. You get to be whoever you wanted to be, but didn’t think you could be as a child. You get to claim ownership of your stories and make them work for you, rather than being a victim of them.

You can still pick up a stick and tell the story of how it’s a magical wizard’s wand. Or look in the mirror and know you’re looking at the reflection of a freaking badass. In the timeless words of SNAP!, “I’ve got the power!”

On Thursday you’ll receive a guide with a few exercises to explore the stories you absorbed as a child. Then next week, we’ll dive into some of the stories society tells us as adults and how those shape our reality.

If you haven’t yet, definitely join our group on Facebook, Self-Love and Self-Worth for Misfits, where we will discuss our experiences with story-telling together. See you on Thursday!