Owning Your Story

Brené Brown wrote that “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it”. There is truth in that, and it is also true that ‘owning our story’ doesn’t mean settling on a single, fixed version for ever.

Because in therapy, our story often changes. Not because the earlier version was untrue, but because it was the ‘survival draft’, the story we had to tell at the time. Our first narratives are shaped by what we could see, feel, and bear at the time depending on our age, capacity, loyalties, and the emotional landscape we were surviving. It’s adaptive and reflects the only vantage point that was available to us then.

As safety grows, the frame gradually widens. With more capacity and more relational support, the same landscape might begin to look different. What once felt like personal failure might reveal itself as adaptation. What once seemed chaotic might show itself as resourcefulness. The story shifts because the person telling it is no longer standing in the same place. This isn’t contradiction, it’s evolution.

When we allow our story to breath we stop treating our inner world like a courtroom, and start relating to it as a landscape - something that reveals different features depending on the light, the season, the distance. The truth doesn’t disappear, it just become more multi dimensional.

Therapy doesn't overwrite the old story. Instead, it honours it, integrates it, and makes room for the next version to emerge. One that can hold more complexity, more compassion, more truth. ‘Owning our story’ doesn’t mean freezing it. It means allowing it to grow along with us.