Narrative Therapy and Identity: How to Stop Living Someone Else’s Story
Most of us walk through life carrying a backpack filled with other people’s words. A parent’s dream job, a friend’s taste in music, a partner’s way of telling a joke. We gather these things the way you might pick up seashells on a beach, without thinking too much about whether they belong in your pocket.
And that’s the beautiful part.
It’s how we connect. How we find our people.
It’s also how we sometimes lose ourselves…
The Hand-Me-Down Story
Narrative therapists call this taking up a story that isn’t yours.
It gives “I’m majoring in pre-law because my mom’s a lawyer” energy. Or, in the classic movie version: “Playing basketball isn’t my dream, Dad, it’s yours!”
Of course, real life is more nuanced than a dramatic locker-room scene.
It might be:
A woman quietly believing her worth is smaller than a man’s (research on gender bias backs this up).
An immigrant deciding that safety means softening their accent (APA on immigrant mental health).
A queer person holding onto shame they never asked for (The Trevor Project on internalized homophobia).
A survivor carrying the belief that they were somehow to blame.
These beliefs often start as survival strategies.
When you’re young, aligning yourself with your family’s or community’s worldview can mean staying quiet or small in order to stay emotionally and/ or physically safe. Challenging others might mean conflict, judgment, or even distance from the people you love.
So you strategically keep their story as your own.
Even when it stops fitting.
Even when it starts hurting.
How Therapy Can Help You Reclaim Yourself
Therapy, especially narrative therapy and the work we do in individual therapy, offers a space where you can lay that story out on the table and really look at it.
At Our Kind, you create a secure relationship with your therapist where you can bring your wants and needs into the room without being asked to shrink yourself. Here, you can deconstruct the narratives you’ve inherited, and reimagine ones that feel like home in your body.
Your Our Kind therapist helps create:
A safe witness: A therapist who can hold the weight of your pressure and expectations.
Room to rewrite: To choose new meanings for your life that serve your well-being.
Connection without erasure: You don’t have to abandon your people to find yourself. You can learn to live in both truth and relationship.
Because this isn’t about creating boundaries between loved ones or abandoning your culture. It's more nuanced than that.
We help you make room for your ‘and’. The story in which your identity and your community exist, your truth and your relationships. So you feel whole and accepted.
The Risk (and the Relief)
Let’s be real: rewriting your story isn’t without risk.
It can feel like pulling a thread and wondering if the whole sweater will unravel.
What if people see you differently?
What if they stop loving you?
But here’s the truth: When you make space for your own story, you’re not erasing your past, you’re making a home for your future self. You’re building a connection that doesn’t require you to disappear.
And that creates the kind of belonging that makes you feel less alone.
If you’re ready to stop carrying the weight of someone else’s story, schedule your free consultation with an Our Kind Therapist now.
Written by Benjamin Carter, MHC-LP
