Happy Healthy Counselling, supporting change
Derren Brown in his 2019 TED talk in Vancouver does a brilliant introduction explaining how we relate to the world. “I feel that magic is a great analogy for how we edit reality and form a story and then mistake that story for the truth”. (Derren Brown TED Talk Vancouver 2019).
He says that of all the infinite data points, there are in the world, we take a few of them and construct a story. And this is how we relate to the world and everyone and everything in it.
I believe that we all try to make sense of the world and in order to do that we have to limit the amount of information that we can manage. We see the world based on the data we collect and we convince ourselves that is what happened.
In my work I often remind people that just because we can construct a sound logical and credible hypothesis, it does not mean that it is true. I was working with a person that I knew quite a lot about their childhood and that they were adopted as a baby. They had come to the session and said that they had been thinking about why they were not able to have healthy attachments. He said that he had gone through his life and was able to show how from birth onwards, he did not have good experiences starting at birth when he was placed in care and likely did not have a good experience there. I knew that he did not know very much about the home he was in before he was adopted and so I said, what happens to your logical argument, if the home was a very good one? He said that I had spent all week thinking about this and I had undone all the work, just by offering an alternative view point.
As humans we process what is happening by constructing a story, be this about our past or what might happen in the future. As they are our stories we can write better happier ones for ourselves. We can do this to make peace with our past. We can also do this as an alternative to catastrophizing.
The hard work is finding a way for the story to be believable. One morning I was walking my dogs when I saw a cat get trapped under the rear tyre of a car. I screamed at the drive to reverse. It seemed to be forever before they did. The cat ran off. I could not follow it to see what I could do. I went to work and was still feeling bad and thinking about the cat. A colleague asked me what was the matter and I told them. I added that I have decided that the cat ran home the owner was there, took the cat to the vet and the cat got the best treatment. They said how do you know that the cat didn’t just be in pain and more. I said I do not know, but both options are possible. As I have no evidence for what was the outcome, I have to decide how to process what I saw.
I felt that I could not rule out that the cat might have died, but my version has the cat having the least suffering. I did not want to try to convince myself that the cat was fine. It had been hit by a car. I felt the position I took allowed me have closure without being in denial that the cat had suffered.
I find we collect evidence from what people do or say and convince ourselves that this proves something. It proves that we can construct a story that has a compelling story line to it. It does not mean that it’s true.
And I think I should end with the line that Darren Brown says in his TED talk, “and we’d worry a lot less about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do”.
