What If Your Stories Are the Root Cause of Your Problems?

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves determine our happiness

Anna Katharina Schaffner

This article was originally published on Psychology Today on 11 November 2025.

We are story-telling animals. Stories are our core sense-making tools. We constantly spin narratives in our head – about the world, other people, what we are doing and seeing. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are especially important. They shape our sense of identity, our interpretations of our past and our expectations for our future. [1] What is more, they also significantly determine our overall sense of well-being and life-satisfaction. [2]

We constantly filter, select and interpret information, and then we establish relationships of cause and effect. However, we are story-telling animals with serious blinkers on, prone to various cognitive biases. We are particularly unreliable narrators when it comes to our own self-story—the story we have built over time to explain who we are and how we have come to be. Our self-story curates selective moments, characters, and circumstances of our life into a coherent whole. It can be supportive and generative, or toxic and destructive.

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves represent one of the most powerful and neglected forces in our lives. Often, we aren’t even aware of these stories. They may just hum along in our subconscious mind, and yet they shape our sense of self and our inner and outer reality in a very profound way. These stories show up as the inner voiceover of our life. A voice that selects scenes to remember, that directs our attention in the present, and that constantly comments on and interprets what is going on. Unfortunately, many of us are extremely ungenerous interpreters of the facts of our lives.

Joan Didion wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Our inner narrator will say, because of x, y happened, and because of y, z happened, and so on, stringing disparate events together into a narrative sequence of cause and effect. If our inner narrator is compassionate, expansive, and encouraging, it unlocks possibility. If it is harsh, blaming, or limiting, it shapes our reality in painful ways.

Crucially, our self-stories can be either helpful or unhelpful. They can energise and empower us, or they can dramatically hold us back. In some cases, they can keep us trapped in old cycles of self-blaming, self-loathing, or self-sabotage, or in cycles of world- and other-blaming. Our inner narrator may whisper to us self-blaming narratives like ‘I’m stupid', ‘I’m ugly’, and ‘I’m bad’, or it may keep us trapped in world-blaming stories such as ‘I’m the best’, ‘I’m a victim’, or ‘I’m different and destined to remain alone.’ These stories are like negative trances, keeping us stuck in problematic patterns.

I believe that toxic self-stories are the root causes of many of our psychological challenges. If we want to change our unhelpful core beliefs, automatic negative thoughts, bullying inner critics, crippling perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and low self-esteem, we must change the stories that produce them. Our core beliefs are but the rotten fruit of toxic stories. 

In my new book The Story Solution: Change Your Toxic Self-Stories and Thrive (forthcoming in January 2026), I share case studies, counter-stories and powerful psychological tools from narrative psychology, ACT, CBT, solution-oriented coaching, Stoicism, and clinical hypnotherapy so that you can become aware of, truly understand, and then change the self-stories that no longer serve you. I illuminate the six most common toxic scripts ('I'm stupid', 'I'm ugly', 'I'm bad' on the self-blaming side of the spectrum, and 'I'm the best', 'I'm a victim', and 'I'm different' on the world-blaming side), and present a powerful 5-step programme so that you can become a fairer and more discerning observer, scribe, editor, interpreter, and author of your story.

And know that it is possible to change our stories. It is true that our stories may have been with us for a very long time and that they were mostly written in the past, but that doesn’t mean that they are written in stone. We are the narrators, subjects, and authors of our stories—and that paradoxical status works in our favour.

We are not just story-telling animals but also learning animals: We can learn to cultivate self-awareness and actively pay attention to our story and our thinking patterns. We can learn to recalibrate our attention, to access and spotlight different memories, and to develop kinder and more balanced interpretations of our past. Just as we can train our bodies, or learn new practical skills, we can also learn to use various metacognitive tools that help us control our attention and reframe our judgements.

References

[1] My own Story Solution model is grounded in and builds on the scientific research of various narrative psychologists, especially Dan P. McAdams’ research on self-stories. McAdams is the author of numerous academic papers as well as 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).

[2] See, for example, 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.

Image: Etienne Girardet @Unsplash