Clinical Hypnotherapy  |  Neuroscience

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

By Michael Greaves  |  Melbourne Strategic Hypnotherapy

Easter is a season that invites reflection. Whatever your beliefs, the themes running through this time of year are remarkably universal. Loss, transformation, and the possibility of seeing things differently. This Easter I want to share a piece of neuroscience that speaks directly to these themes, and to much of the work I do with clients every day.

A Strange Discovery

In the 1960s, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was studying a group of unusual patients. These were people who had undergone a surgical procedure severing the corpus callosum, the neural bridge connecting the brain's two hemispheres, as a treatment for severe epilepsy.

What he found changed our understanding of the human mind considerably.

By presenting different information to each hemisphere independently, he discovered something that stopped him in his tracks. When the left hemisphere was asked to explain actions generated by the right, information it had absolutely no access to, rather than admitting it didn't know, it instantly produced a confident, fluent, completely plausible explanation.

No hesitation. No uncertainty. Just a story.

Gazzaniga called this the interpreter mechanism. A system in the left hemisphere whose job is to generate a continuous, coherent narrative about who we are and why we do what we do (Gazzaniga, 1967; Gazzaniga & LeDoux, 1978).

The interpreter is running right now as you read this. It is explaining your reactions, justifying your decisions, and assembling the story of your life into something that feels consistent and true.

Here is the catch. The interpreter frequently has no access to the actual causes of our behaviour. Much of what drives us operates below conscious awareness entirely. The interpreter simply fills the gaps, fluently and convincingly, and presents the result to us as fact.

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are, to a significant degree, constructed after the fact. Plausible stories dressed as self-knowledge.

This has been supported by subsequent research. Nisbett and Wilson's landmark study (1977) demonstrated that people consistently confabulate explanations for their own behaviour, reporting causes that had no actual relationship to what had driven them, with complete confidence.

The Stories That Hold Us

I hear the interpreter's work in the clinic regularly.

"I am broken."
"I have always been this way."
"This is just who I am."
"I cannot help how I react, that is just me."

These feel like self-knowledge to the people carrying them. They feel earned, observed, true. But sit with them for a moment. How much weight do they carry? How long have they been there?

Very often they are the interpreter doing exactly what it was designed to do, constructing coherent meaning from incomplete information, then defending that meaning against anything that might disturb it.

The mind has a strong investment in being right. Research by Kunda (1990) on motivated reasoning demonstrated that people unconsciously seek out information confirming existing beliefs and dismiss information that challenges them. This is not a character flaw. It is a feature of a system that evolved to act quickly and consistently.

The problem is not that we have stories. A coherent self-narrative is actually essential. McAdams (1993) argues that personal narrative is central to identity formation and psychological wellbeing. The problem arises when we become the story, rather than recognising it as one.

When the map becomes the territory, as Korzybski put it, we stop being able to navigate.

An Easter Reflection

The Easter narratives are fascinating through this lens.

Peter in the courtyard on the night of the arrest tells three confident stories. I do not know this man. The interpreter running at speed, generating a survival narrative in real time. Then the cockerel crows and the story collapses. What follows is not comfortable. But it is the beginning of something more honest.

Then there is the Road to Emmaus. Two disciples walking away from Jerusalem, locked inside a narrative of defeat so total that they fail to recognise the person walking directly beside them. Their interpreter was running a story so consuming it overrode direct experience. It was only when they stopped and became present that the story dissolved and they could see clearly.

Both are images of what happens when a constructed narrative finally encounters something it cannot absorb. Disorienting. Painful. And ultimately freeing.

What This Actually Means for Change

This is where neuroscience and therapeutic practice meet in a way I find genuinely compelling.

One reason change is so difficult through conscious effort alone is that the interpreter actively resists it. Challenging a core belief about yourself is, neurologically speaking, experienced as a threat. Research by Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004) demonstrated that social and psychological pain activates the same neural regions as physical pain. The brain does not distinguish between a threat to the body and a threat to the self-concept. Both register as danger.

So when someone sits with a belief like "I am broken" and tries to reason their way out of it, the interpreter is not a passive observer. It is defending territory.

This is part of why the combination of hypnotherapy and CBT reaches places that willpower and reasoning alone often cannot. Hypnotherapy works beneath the interpreter, at the level of the subconscious systems where the raw material of our stories was originally laid down. Alladin and Alibhai (2007) found that cognitive hypnotherapy produced significantly greater reductions in depression than CBT alone, suggesting that working simultaneously at conscious and subconscious levels produces more substantial change.

Rather than arguing with the narrative, we work with the level where the narrative formed.

CBT then provides the conscious framework to recognise the interpreter's constructions for what they are, to hold them more lightly, and to begin choosing more useful stories deliberately.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If many of the stories you carry about yourself were constructed rather than discovered, what might become possible if even one of them turned out to be optional?

The interpreter will resist that question. That is its job.

But somewhere beneath the story, I think you already sense the answer.

Michael Greaves is a Clinical Hypnotherapist and Psychotherapist at Melbourne Strategic Hypnotherapy, Caulfield North. If any of this resonates, we offer a free 15 minute consultation and would be glad to hear from you.

References

Alladin, A. & Alibhai, A. (2007). Cognitive hypnotherapy for depression: An empirical investigation. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 55(2), 147-166.
Eisenberger, N.I. & Lieberman, M.D. (2004). Why rejection hurts: A common neural alarm system for physical and social pain. Science, 302(5643), 290-292.
Gazzaniga, M.S. (1967). The split brain in man. Brain, 90(2), 217-236.
Gazzaniga, M.S. & LeDoux, J.E. (1978). The Integrated Mind. Plenum Press.
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480-498.
McAdams, D.P. (1993). The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. Guilford Press.
Nisbett, R.E. & Wilson, T.D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259.