Are You Stuck in a Story that No Longer Serves You?

The hidden psychological forces that shape your identity, happiness and future

Anna Katharina Schaffner

This article was originally published as an essential read on Psychology Today on 1 January 2026.

Pause for a moment and listen to your mind. Not to your breath. Not to the sounds around you. But to the quiet, relentless commentary running in the background.

This always happens to me.

They probably think I’m incompetent and stupid.

I should be so much further along by now.

There’s no point trying.

I’m a bad, ugly, damaged person, and nobody will ever love me.

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who occasionally tell stories. In truth, we are storytelling animals who occasionally reason. We constantly narrativize our existence – selecting facts, interpreting, explaining, judging, and predicting. We spin narratives about the world, other people, what we are doing, what things mean, and what will happen next. And while these stories feel like neutral descriptions of reality, they are anything but.

Stories help us make sense of existence. They impose order on chaos. In our inner narratives, we select particular scenes, establish causal links between events, and assign roles. Some people become heroes or helpers, others rivals or villains. We spotlight certain moments, and quietly edit out others.

This narrative impulse is not a flaw. It is a fundamental human capacity. Without stories, our lives would feel incoherent and meaningless. But not all stories are helpful. Some can trap us in harmful patterns.

The Stories That Matter Most

The most influential story you will ever tell is the one you have about yourself – your self-story. It determines not just your present well-being but also your future. Each of us carries a complex inner narrative explaining who we are, how we became this way, and what is possible for us in the future. Based on a carefully curated selection of memories and interpretations, our self-story creates coherence and continuity. It furnishes our existence with meaning.

But our self-stories shape far more than our identity. They influence how we interpret the past, how we anticipate the future, how motivated we feel, how we act in relationships, and how satisfied we are with our lives.

Narrative psychologists such as Jonathan Adler, Dan McAdams, Kate McLean, and B. A. Rogers have shown that our well-being depends to a significant extent on how we storify our lives. People whose self-stories follow redemption narratives – stories of growth, learning, and transformation – or who see their lives as a form of hero’s journey, tend to report greater life satisfaction and psychological resilience.

By contrast, unhelpful self-stories often follow patterns of decline, stagnation, or futility. We may tell ourselves that we are defective, lacking essential resources, or fundamentally different from others in ways that doom us to failure. These narratives don’t just feel unpleasant – they act like ongoing psychological suggestions. And suggestions shape experience.

When Stories Turn Toxic

Unhelpful self-stories function like negative trances. They seep into our emotional lives, colonise our imagination, shape our actions, and distort our relationships. Over time, they become a major source of psychological suffering.

If you repeatedly tell yourself that you are helpless, unlucky, or destined to fail, your nervous system listens. Your motivation falters. Your sense of agency shrinks. You stop attempting to shape your life – not because you can’t, but because your story tells you there’s no point.

In this way, self-stories are not merely sense-making tools. They are reality-shaping. They feel to us like the truth about who we are. And because they feel true, we act as if they are true.

Why Bad Stories Are So Hard to Dislodge

One reason self-stories are so powerful is that they are self-perpetuating. We are highly susceptible to cognitive biases, especially confirmation bias. We constantly filter our perceptions, memories, and interpretations to fit our existing narratives.

If your core story is “I always fail,” your attention will automatically zoom in on setbacks and dismiss evidence of competence or success. If your story is “I am fundamentally flawed and unlovable,” moments of rejection will feel like proof, while moments of acceptance will be quietly discounted.

Over time, unhelpful self-stories harden into self-authenticating beliefs. To avoid cognitive dissonance, our attention and memory become increasingly selective. We curate our lived experience to fit the narrative we already hold. And this is how our stories become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The Good News: Stories Can Change

Here is the crucial point—and the most hopeful one. While our stories shape us, our stories are also ours to shape.

It is possible to change our relationship to our inner narratives. We can learn to step back from them, to see them as constructions rather than as immutable truths. We can broaden access to our memories, recalibrate our attention, and loosen the grip of self-blaming or world-blaming interpretations. In my new book, The Story Solution: Change Your Toxic Self-Stories and Thrive, I present a five-step framework for transforming our inner narratives into ones that truly serve us.

This does not mean replacing “negative” stories with artificially positive affirmations. Nor does it mean denying hardship or pain. It means becoming a more discerning narrator of our own lives.

We can learn to ask better questions:

• What evidence am I repeatedly highlighting—and what am I ignoring?

• Which version of this story makes me more capable, compassionate, and alive?

• What would a fairer, fuller interpretation look like?

Our stories may be old, familiar, and deeply ingrained – but they are not written in stone. We are not condemned to replay the same unhelpful narratives until the end of our days. Just as we can train our bodies and acquire new skills, we can train our minds to develop more flexible, compassionate, and empowering ways of making sense of ourselves.

We are not merely the characters in our stories. We are also their narrators – and, with practice, we can become wiser and more discerning editors.

References

Jonathan M. Adler et al., ‘The incremental validity of narrative identity in predicting well-being: A review of the field and recommendations for the future’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(2) (2016), 142–75.

Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self(New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1993) and The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, revised and expanded edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Kate C. McLean et al., ‘The empirical structure of narrative identity: The initial Big Three’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(4) (2020), 920–44.

B. A. Rogers et al., ‘Seeing your life story as a hero’s journey increases meaning in life’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125 (4) (2023), 752–78.

Image: SOCIALCUT @Unsplash