Personal myths often form through painful emotional conditioning.
It’s a myth that a myth is necessarily untrue. See what I did there? But bear with me, because myths are important for mental health.
We often think of myths as traditional, often ancient, sacred stories. Stories believed to be true that explain natural events or the origins of the world through narratives featuring gods, supernatural beings, or heroes.
Myths have come to mean curious explanations that ‘primitive’ people held for natural phenomena before the enlightenment of science granted us superior understanding.
Unlike ordinary fiction, these stories were once accepted as true within the cultures that created them. They were used to make sense of the unknown.
Common modern myths (untruths that are widely believed to be true) include:
- The Great Wall of China can be seen from space with the naked eye.
- We only use 10% of our brains.
- Most body heat is lost through the head.
And yet myths – or mythos, a body of myths – certainly can be based in truth.
Living by narrative
Believing science has ‘all the answers’ is a myth that clearly has some truth. It’s a narrative, a set of beliefs that inform opinion, thoughts, feelings, and actions. Yet ‘science will save us all and be our ultimate salvation’ is as religious psychologically as any ‘primitive’ religion.
Myths are narratives that we use to explain how life, the universe, and everything works. And myths matter.
It’s myths that cause political or religious-based killings, such as the Stalinist purges or witches being burned at the stake.
Yet we seldom stop to think about the accepted narratives we live by. Many myths have come to be seen as ‘self-evident’ and obvious truths rather than as myths.
Personal emotional myths
Low self-esteem can be seen as myth. So too can cynicism and pessimism, as well as their opposite, optimism and unwavering trust in the ‘goodness of humanity’.
We all live by many unexamined myths – aspects of reality that we’ve come to see as ‘self-evident’. Some are imprinted onto us by the accident of where and when we are born, often posing as individually arrived-at ‘truths’. But others are personal, perhaps emotionally based myths that we form to make sense of what may be a painful reality.
Personal myths often form through painful emotional conditioning. They are narratives a person forms which encompass a whole philosophy of life. As with many traditional myths, they are often fatalistic, predictive of how things will ‘end up’.
Common emotionally based myths include sentiments such as:
- “No one can ever love me!”
- “People always let you down in the end!”
- “Life’s a bitch and then you die!”
- “Nothing ever works out for me!”
- “All men are potential rapists!”
- “All women are gold diggers!”
Ultimately a myth is an overarching belief system which is formed from generalizations. And myths can have catastrophic results.
Toxic globalizing
A myth is a generalization. Something that seems true in one context is globalized to encompass a whole philosophy of life.
- The Sun rises every morning… It is human child sacrifice that keeps it rising!
- Planes drop food as aid for islanders… Building fake planes out of straw will please the gods and make food appear!
- My father abandoned me… Men can never be trusted!
Checking you’ve switched the gas off a hundred times or placing your hand in boiling water to prevent a loved one dying is also ritualistic – another central aspect of mythology.
The myth’s explanatory narrative may be self-harming, as with low self-esteem or chronic pessimism, or it may be generally constructive, as in “I can do anything I set my mind to.”
People can be willing to kill or die for these personally-arrived-at beliefs just as much as they can for more culturally based mythologies. The ‘all women are betrayers’ myth may lead a jealous man to kill his wife. The ‘life is hopeless’ myth may cause someone to take their own life.
So if someone has formed a strong self-harming myth, what can we do about that? How might we help them without simply trying to force them out of their entrenched belief system?
Not so long ago an Uncommon Practitioner in India asked about how to help a client who had the core belief that he was unlovable, powerless, and would always be treated unfairly.
You can listen to my reply, or you can read a slightly condensed transcript of the question and answer below.
Who knows? You might find it useful.
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Listen to Mark’s answer or read below
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Question
My client, a 38-year-old male, has moderate depression. His depressive thinking is based on the core belief that he’s unlovable, powerless, and will always be unfairly treated. He lost his mother at 16. Both his parents were always biased and preferred his elder brother over him. He feels deeply depressed because of this major reason, and he applies this to pretty much everything else: to his wife; his profession; he even believes his 3-year-old son will leave him after “using” him. What hypnotherapy techniques can be used for him? He is also losing sleep.
Answer
Hello Isha.
We all live by myths. A myth isn’t necessarily untrue or totally false, but human beings need myths to live by: a narrative to explain things. Sometimes that narrative is grafted onto us by others, such as the mythos that science can explain everything, or religion can or can’t, and so on.
Some myths are empowering and encouraging; others are self-harming or dangerous to others. ‘All sinners should be burned at the stake’ type of thing.
Further, some myths are not so much cultural but emotional: they form and coalesce through experience and emotional conditioning and ‘toxic’ relationships, so that we develop a framework of belief to ‘explain’ all that. It – the myth – may form around the central core belief that “I am unlovable” or unlucky, that “everyone is evil” or all men or all women are, or that “everyone betrays you in the end”… and so on.
Some personal emotional myths are more useful than others. The mythos that “I can chart my own course in life” or “get through anything”, or that “everything will be all right in the end” is usually a more helpful myth to live by than the opposite mythology.
Myths are important. People die and kill because of myths.
But it’s worth us all examining our own mythos, both personal and cultural. What sacred cows (forgive me for using that analogy!) do we live by? Are they really good approximations of reality? Do they need to be superseded by something more subtle or flexible?
When someone lives by a myth, they have told themselves a story about the way things – they think – actually are.
So hypnotherapeutically I tend to tell such people stories, as they relax deep in trance, that broadly speaking match their myth, but also loosen it and introduce more positive elements.
An example of this might be the classic tale of Cinderella, which is a tale that has been replicated in different cultures, even when those cultures had had no apparent contact with one another. When stories spontaneously appear in different places it may be because they speak to a deep and common aspect of humanity. Cinderella appears in the Native American tradition as well as northern Europe and so on.
In the Indian tradition in Sanskrit there is, of course, the Pancha-tantra tradition of animal stories. Thousands of them. Of course, the animals can reflect both different types of human being and different parts of one human being.
So, for example – I believe it’s from the Pancha-tantra story – there is the tale of the elephants and the clever rabbit.
In a forest near a dried-up lake lived a large herd of elephants led by a mighty king. During a severe drought, the elephants discovered a hidden lake deep in the forest and began visiting it daily to drink and bathe.
But this lake was also home to a colony of rabbits. Each time the elephants came, their heavy feet crushed the rabbits’ homes. Many rabbits were killed. The survivors felt helpless and doomed. Yet they didn’t know that despite being seemingly powerless they were not, in fact helpless.
“We are small and weak!” they cried. “They are enormous and powerful. We will always be destroyed.”
But one wise old rabbit proposed a daring plan: “I will go alone to the elephant king and speak to him.”
The other rabbits were terrified. “You? Alone? He will crush you!”
But the rabbit replied, “Power is not only in size and destiny isn’t to be looked at in the past.”
That night, under the full moon, the rabbit approached the elephant king and said:
“O King, I am the messenger of the Moon, guardian of this sacred lake. You and your herd have angered the Moon by trampling his beloved rabbits.”
The elephant king was shocked. “The Moon? We meant no harm!”
The rabbit led him to the lake and showed him the moon’s reflection trembling in the water. “Behold,” said the rabbit, “the Moon trembles in anger.”
The elephant king, filled with awe and remorse, promised never to return. The elephants left forever. The rabbits were safe.
Now what was that all about? Well it may carry several messages. One is that there’s always a way to improve things. Another is that power does not only come from dominance. It comes from creativity, boundaries, and self-trust.
The rabbits were being harmed, but instead of resigning to victimhood, they acted wisely.
Now this part is crucial: The story does not deny injustice. It shows that injustice can be responded to skillfully. The moon can be seen as a cosmic force protecting even those who superficially seem small and insignificant… and many other meanings besides.
People, like some of the rabbits, sometimes make themselves smaller than they need to be.
But we don’t explain stories to our clients. In the same way that you don’t have to give a scientific breakdown of all the chemical compounds in a meal when someone is just enjoying it and about to absorb it inwardly.
So, for mythos, however negative and self-harming, use therapeutic mythos – along with all the other solution-focused hypnotic strategies you might use.
Explore stories, learn from them, and see where they intersect with your clients’ own created tales and myths as to how they have come to believe their own lives are organized.
How to Tackle Entrenched Core Beliefs
Do you work with clients whose core beliefs – like “I am unlovable” or “everyone betrays you in the end” – have hardened into personal myths that resist direct challenge? The Conversational Reframing Course gives you artful, non-confrontational techniques to loosen those entrenched narratives and introduce new possibilities within session. Explore the Conversational Reframing Course
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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