“Sticky” stories: A take on limiting beliefs from a queer person of color
and an authentic view on house music in mindfulness spaces
If you sometimes feel limited by your past: congratulations! You have joined the ranks of being human in a (most likely) capitalist culture.
"Sticky" stories—deeply ingrained limiting beliefs—can shape our day and self-perception.
Outline:
neurological underpinnings make our stories sticky
three common narrators that perpetuate these limiting beliefs
takeaway practices to begin reframing and reauthoring your life story
Understanding Your Sticky Stories
Understanding that our deepest beliefs stem from childhood helps us challenge and rewrite them.
Imagine you are an infant and your brain is a ball of play-doh.
Hang with me for a minute.
Your undeveloped brain is impressionable. Every time really anything of emotional consequence happens, run your finger with slight pressure, from the top of the ball to the bottom.
You cry - someone tends to you.
You cry - no one tends to you.
Connections are made. Every time that connection is made, the groove gets deeper.
Unfortunately, the brain creating those grooves as an infant—without a social context or language—is the same brain that tells us what those connections mean today.
Trauma expert Gabor Maté explains “each time we scream at someone in traffic, we are telling a story from the earliest part of our life.”
And yet, research on neuroplasticity demonstrates how challenging the truthfulness of our limiting stories actively re-orients brains toward more fulfilling thought and habit patterns.1
What old story about yourself are you ready to revise? What are the steps you’re taking to change it?
A Sticky Story
Let me give you a recent example.
I've worked to normalize meta-communication with friends, discussing how we communicate. For it to work, nothing is prescriptive. The key is finding a rhythm and practice that leaves both parties feeling heard and respected.
For me, this has most often looked like announcing that I practice meta-communication and asking if it’s a good time to talk.
“I really find talking about our relationship helps keep things transparent. If you’re open to this, would now be a good time?”
I give these details because last month, I repeated an untrue story.
I told someone I have a “bad habit of letting things fester and then leaving without notice.”
This is a story about someone letting conflict fester, staying silent, passive, and child-like, not about how I cultivate communication in the present-day relationships I actively seek.
Did I lie? No. (Remember, I’m a speech act nerd. I won’t go down that rabbit hole but no, that’s not a lie.)
Was I wrong? Simple answer: Honestly, kinda, yeah. I was wrong.
This is one of many instances of something being “real, but not true.”
For me, this narrative stems from a childhood wherein my habit was indeed, to be silent and small, until I left home at 18.
But I’m far from 18 today and my practices have matured.
The feeling behind the statement was a real lapse back into those old grooves, but the statement did not truthfully represent my ability to communicate.
My error makes me more human, not less, and more dedicated to helping others through what I’ve learned in my practice.
What story are you telling yourself? What is a more liberating story you can tell?
Identifying and Reframing Limiting Beliefs
Now that we've explored the personal impact of sticky stories, let's delve into identifying the sources of limiting beliefs and ways to begin working with them.
Your Childhood: Limiting Beliefs Aplenty!
Parental voices can be quite sticky for the developmental reasons above.
Because of how easy it is for stories to “stick” from a young age, it can be empowering to remember the law of impermanence. We change.
In my story coaching workshops, I offer a series of writing exercises for creative and communal processing. We create dialogues with voices from our childhoods and share them in small groups.
These day-long or weekend events begin with naming our sticky stories and reframing them from different points in our life, different parts of our bodies, different emotional states. We culminate in a revised story about what our past means to our present today.
Still, it’s not as easy as just saying, “today, I will stop doing something I’ve been doing since childhood.”
It doesn’t take positive thinking. Or hoping for something in the future.
It takes practice, patience, and compassionate action now. And action now. And action now, to make now better.
Doing it in a community reminds us we aren’t as alone as we think.
Transitions: Whozits and Whatzits Galore!
Yet those social communities can make transitions harder. We build our identities interpersonally.
Particularly for those amid a transition (geographic, career, sexual), wherein the ground seems to shift more frequently than the weather, who you were can stick like a burr.
Philosopher Thomas Merton said all of life is the attempt to make an incoherent story a coherent one: “It is most important not just to have a bunch of answers up here [taps head] but to struggle. Life is a struggle. To struggle in such a way such that the struggle is not totally wasted.”
You are not your academic degree. You are not your childhood. You aren’t your salary. You are not your feelings, just like you are not the bagel you ate this morning.
We are all doing what we can in these very finite, fragile human bodies. No one has it easy.
How we struggle defines our character. Revising our struggle can recover our sense of agency.
And, with the gruff and compassionate voice of meditation teacher and radio host Wes Nisker, “You are not your fault!”
Oppressive Systems: Flipping your fins won’t get you far. Be authentic and use your feet!
At the same time, marginalized folks have their sticky stories “verified” by systemic oppression, making it feel harder to liberate ourselves.
Very few queer people of color feel comfortable in our own bodies because of macro and micro policing where our bodies can go, how our bodies perform, and what our bodies say.
We are constantly defending our right to exist, to love whomever we choose. Some of our elders fought to drink from a water fountain. Some of us now fight to go to the bathroom.
In spiritual spaces, oppression can sound like the condescending, colonizing, capitalist language of “authenticity.”
According to Black, queer, Zen priest Rev. Dr. angel kyodo williams,
Too many of us as dharma [Buddhist] teachers have also given up our authenticity because our livelihood is tied to people’s feeling of being comfortable.
[…] I just want to let you know that if it’s all warm and fuzzy all the time, then someone is really not dropping wisdom.
[…] I’m not saying you’re wasting your time. Maybe you want kinder, gentler suffering. Maybe that’s what you’re in it for.
But if it’s liberation you’re after, and you’re not experiencing discomfort, liberation is not where you’re headed. You just need to know that.
These colonizing voices may complain cultures of spontaneous joy aren’t revolutionary as Langston Hughes suggests. All that prancing is performative.
These voices may feel it’s “disrespectful” to Act Up in a sacred space. Ignore unforgivable medical debt in a system that doesn’t find your illness profitable. Instead, read the room (not yours, silly, the one this critical voice occupies).
These voices may lament the lack of “steady awareness” in delivery style of QPOC teachers like Jonathan Relucio, who introduce playful movement into queer, laboring bones. The Buddha never condoned house music!
Those voices are wrong.
We can create spaces of liberation.
Those spaces can be the pages of our life story.
Those spaces can be our own beautiful, singing bodies.
Takeaway Practice
Beginners:
One of my favorite publishers, The School of Life, recently published an article called “Complete the Sentence—And Find Out What’s Really On Your Mind.” It provides 60 prompts for you to finish, that may help you identify stories that keep you stuck.
I suggest giving it a skim and trying out the exercise. They use the word “test,” but it’s just an exploration.
Everyone else:
When you find yourself in a story loop, stuck in the past, or otherwise charged, ask yourself: is my sense of what’s happening here true? Your emotions are real, but are the story beats, character motivations, and consequences true?
Next-Up
A post on compassion for adoptees. If you have any resources to include, I’d love to list them!
Currently Reading
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon
Bio and Mentorship Info
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a mindful integration mentor offering 1:1 sessions and group workshops. They help people communicate, connect, and belong.
If you found this post helpful and would like to discuss practical tips for applying this to your own life, please sign up for a free 30-minute consultation at Light Hive Integration.
Last edited: 4/21/24
Zimmerman, J. (2017). Neuro-narrative Therapy: Brain Science, Narrative Therapy, Poststructuralism, and Preferred Identities. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 36, 12-26. https://doi.org/10.1521/JSYT.2017.36.2.12.