What’s your story?

What’s your story?

I stumbled over giving my maiden name the other day; funny how it took so long to adapt to my married name and now my maiden name is slowly becoming alien to me. I’d bumped into a teacher from about 19 years ago; he recalled a relative rather than myself, parents or younger siblings when he heard my surname. The entirety of my existence was being recalled and held against a name that I no longer use, and nor do I have a bond with the person he was specifically recalling. When I explained that no connection remained there was some clear confusion.

The encounter stayed with me all day. My maiden name and my family history is bound up in a story, of someone else’s telling for that teacher, that person although related, does not know my family anymore. I wondered about that story; the intricate details established to form a sense of family, that person’s need to create a sense of togetherness, the teacher’s reaction to me altering that illusion and the assumptions made about me based on someone body else’s version of events and someone else’s experience of that surname.

It made me think about assumptions in general and how we can get it so very wrong if we don’t engage with checking out the evidence for the deep-seated thoughts that we hold so rigidly (I’ve blogged about fact-checking before and I still believe in its importance).

One of the things about counselling is that on a daily basis I challenge clients to examine why they think the things that they do, where is the evidence coming from and consider if is it even their own thoughts that they are holding. Once you get into these realms the results can often be dramatic. We take many things for granted and assumptions are one of them. The encounter yesterday has led me to engage further with the assumptions that we make about mental health and I feel like I can see a parallel:

My maiden name provided a label for the world and a set of connotations and ideals about my family name; people make assumptions about me based on that surname and what it means to them, based on if they know one of us or some of us. When we take a mental health issue, we give it a name or label. Labels are used to create stereotypes so that we can easily get our heads around what that concern is all about. We tend to forget that whilst stereotypes help us chunk information together- many are now outdated, era-dependant and don’t reflect the changing nature of the world nor our understanding of it; some are pejorative too and discriminatory. You meet one individual with one label and that becomes the basis of how you view anyone with that label.

If somebody came up to you today and told you they had, for example, depression:

• What does that one single word bring up for you?
• Does it change how you view them?
• Does it impact on their back story?
• Does it impact on their future?
• Will it impact upon if you can support them if you are already friends?
• Do you want to be friends with someone with depression?
• Where have your own thoughts on depression come from?
• Are they your own thoughts or have stereotypes influenced you?

I’m playing devil’s advocate here but I want to instil the power of words and the connotations that they hold, which in turn affects our assumptions. My maiden name means something to my family and to me, yet it means something very different to other people who either share it or know of it by other forms of association. Mental health concerns mean different things to those who experience them, then they do to people who remain ignorant of them or don’t check out the facts first, before voicing their assumptions. Give that person the chance to tell their story instead of applying someone else’s story to them. Each person’s narrative is different, please don’t assume that you know them based purely on a label; let them illuminate on their own story to truly know them.