The Story I Tell Myself

The hour closed by circling back to the imagined opinions of other people, which is where the boundary conversation had quietly begun. One participant named it precisely: it is not just what other people think, it is what we imagine other people think.

In therapy this often goes by a familiar phrase, “the story I tell myself.” We assume we are being watched and graded. We assume others have opinions about every action we take for our care recipients, and every action we do not take. And the trap is airtight: the same choice gets judged by one person as too much and by another as not enough. If we are trying to satisfy the imagined jury, there is no verdict that acquits us, because the jurors do not agree with each other.

The Jury Is Mostly in Our Heads

What makes this so heavy is that the opinions we fear are often assumptions, and the assumptions are often carry-overs, ideas about how things used to be done. “Back in the old days” thinking, applied to a present that no longer works the way the old days did.

Some perspectives that helped:

• Notice the phrase “the story I tell myself.” Simply labeling a thought as a story, rather than a fact, creates a little distance. “The story I’m telling myself is that my brother thinks I’ve given up on Mom.” Said that way, it becomes a thought to examine rather than a truth to obey.
• You cannot win a contradictory verdict, so stop trying. When the same action is too much for one person and not enough for another, that is proof the standard is impossible, not proof you are failing. The disagreement among your imagined critics is the evidence that the jury is not real.
• Ask whether the opinion is even current. Much of the judgment we brace for belongs to an older world with fewer options. People applying yesterday’s rules to today’s situation are not a standard worth meeting.

The Particular Guilt of Professional Care

One example brought this into sharp focus, and it sits close to the bone for many of us. When today’s participants were young, they watched their own parents care for their parents, our grandparents, at home. It happened at home largely because there was nowhere else. Facilities did not exist the way they do now, and conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s were often understood as simply a part of getting old.

Today the world is different. There are specialists, memory care, residential settings built for exactly these situations. And yet many of us judge ourselves harshly for even considering them, measuring our choices against a generation that kept everyone home, as if that were the more loving path by definition.

The group offered a gentler frame:

• Our parents were doing their best with the options they had. Home care was often the only door open to them, not a verdict that it was the superior choice. Comparing ourselves to it as a moral standard skips that fact.
• We rarely stop to ask what they would have wanted for us. It is worth wondering whether the previous generation, exhausted and under-resourced, would have wished they had today’s options, and whether they would have chosen professional care if it had been available. Many of them, if asked, might not want us to repeat their hardest years out of obligation.
• Choosing professional care is a form of caregiving, not a surrender of it. Arranging skilled, dignified care is a decision made out of love and clear sight, not a failure to do it “the way it used to be done.”
• The cleanest test is the person in front of you, not the imagined audience. What does this specific situation, this specific body, this specific safety picture actually call for? That question has an answer. The imagined jury never will.

We ended where we started, with boundaries and the opinions of others, but holding it differently. So much of what presses on us is a story, often a borrowed one from a world that no longer exists. Naming it as a story does not make the caregiving easier. It does loosen the grip of a jury that was never really seated.

Resources

Own Our History, Change the Story by Brené Brown. A short piece on catching the stories we invent about what others think, and writing a more honest version.