Invisibilia: Be The Author Of Your Story, Not Just The Character

Invisibilia is back to shed some light on the unseeable forces that control our behavior and shape our ideas. Season four debuts with a story about loss. To explore that, they look at how we use words to cope, at a 74-year-old woman who decides to jump out of a plane in order to get over her husband’s death and at a beekeeper who was robbed by Russian mobsters.

What happens often when we experience a terrible loss is that we become stuck. We become prisoners of what-ifs and guilt, and we ruminate on the injustice. But "when the thing that holds your world together disappears, how do you find your way out of the old story and into a new one?”

A researcher studied how we can use words to influence our ability to cope with upsetting experiences. He believes that we all have a story about ourselves, that we keep changing and editing. The loss is the event that makes our story fall apart and we don’t know how to put the pieces back together, so we circle and dig deeper into our misery. However, the study showed that other people are capable of detaching, of changing perspective, of writing their story as if it belonged to someone else. And once they manage to do that they develop a coherent structured narrative.

So, in order to cope, it’s not enough to just have a story about what happened to you, that you keep repeating to yourself and others. At some point you have to zoom out and actively start constructing a different story.