Episode 46: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Christopher and guest co-host Shiloh Logan talk about the power of the stories that we tell ourselves and the impact that they have on our lives. It has been said that “we don’t live in reality, but, rather, we live in our stories about reality.” What does this mean? Human beings are story and meaning-making entities. We are what makes meaning out of reality, and we do this through the stories that we create around and about events and ourselves. Stories are how we make sense of our world, and they are helpful and beneficial to us until they’re not. A primary problem for human beings is when we can’t differentiate between reality and the stories that they have made about reality. This is problematic because once a story is no longer helpful for us, we often can’t shed it from our lives, repent, and move on, because we confuse the story-of-out-own-making for reality itself. One way of first being able to help us differentiate our stories from reality is to see that our stories can never be purely objective, as anything that we create is going to be inherently and necessarily limited. The entirety of our worldview is constructed from the things we-know-we-know and from the things that we-know-we-don’t-know. However, beyond these two things is the entirety of reality of things that we-don’t-know-that-we-don’t-know. Our stories are made by what we-know-we-know and what we-know-we-don’t-know, and because of this, they will never be entirely objective in accounting for the infinite reality of things we-don’t-know-that-we-don’t-know.