其他
TED演讲:如何才能不被生活困住?
故事可以帮你理解自己的人生,但当我们讲的故事具有误导性,不完整性或错误时,会发生什么?
事实上,我们叙述生活的方式决定了我们的生活。这是故事的危险,也是故事的力量。因为这意味着如果我们能够改变我们的故事,那么我们就能改变我们的生活。
当感到焦虑,愤怒或脆弱时 ,当遇到一些困难时,我们可以作为编辑问问自己: 我希望我的故事成为什么样? 然后,去书写你的杰作。
演讲者:Lori Gottlieb
心理治疗师,作家,她将自己的临床经验与最新的研究和文化发展相结合,帮助人们过上更好的生活
演讲的开始我将会给你们分享一封我最近在收件箱看到的邮件。我的收件箱比较特别,因为我是个心理咨询师而且我写着一个叫《亲爱的咨询师》的建议专栏,你也可以想象收件箱里的会是什么。
"Dear Therapist, I've been married for 10 years and things were good until a couple of years ago. That's when my husband stopped wanting to have sex as much, and now we barely have sex at all." I'm sure you guys were not expecting this.“亲爱的咨询师,我结婚 10 年了,直到几年前,一切都很好。那时我丈夫没那么想和我做爱了,现在我们几乎很少有性生活。”我相信你们没有预料到这内容。
"Well, last night I discovered that for the past few months, he's been secretly having long, late-night phone calls with a woman at his office. I googled her, and she's gorgeous. I can't believe this is happening. My father had an affair with a coworker when I was young and it broke our family apart.“昨晚,我发现在过去几个月中,他一直在悄悄地跟他办公室的一个女人打很长的深夜电话。我搜索了她,她很漂亮。我无法相信这发生了。小时候我父亲和他同事发生了外遇,这让我们的家庭支离破碎。
Well, what do you think she should do? If you got this letter, you might be thinking about how painful infidelity is. Or maybe about how especially painful it is here because of her experience growing up with her father. 你们觉得她应该怎么做?如果你收到这封信,你可能会觉得不忠是多么让人痛苦。或尤其考虑到她不忠的父亲的过往,这是多么让人痛苦的事啊。
Now, those are the kinds of things that go through my mind too, when I'm reading these letters in my inbox. But I have to be really careful when I respond to these letters because I know that every letter I get is actually just a story written by a specific author. 当我阅读收件箱里的这些信件时,这些也是我脑海中的感觉。但回复这些邮件的时候,我需要非常小心,因为我知道我收到的每一封信件是一位特别的作者写的故事。
Look, I don't mean that we purposely mislead. Most of what people tell me is absolutely true, just from their current points of view. Depending on what they emphasize or minimize, what they leave in, what they leave out, what they see and want me to see, they tell their stories in a particular way. 并非是我们有意误导。大部分人告诉我的绝对是真的,但只是从他们的视角来看。取决于他们强调或淡化什么,留下了什么,舍弃了什么,看到了什么,以及想让我看到什么,他们用一种特定的方式讲故事。
But what happens when the stories we tell are misleading or incomplete or just wrong? Well, instead of providing clarity, these stories keep us stuck. We assume that our circumstances shape our stories. But what I found time and again in my work is that the exact opposite happens. 但当我们讲述的故事有误导性、不完整,或错误时,会怎样呢?这些故事不仅没有提供准确清晰的信息,反倒把我们困住了。我们认定我们的环境塑造了我们的故事。但在我的工作中,我一次又一次地发现,情况恰恰相反。
Now, I told you I'm a therapist, and I really am, I'm not being an unreliable narrator. But if I'm, let's say, on an airplane, and someone asks what I do, I usually say I'm an editor. 我告诉过你们我是个咨询师,我真的是,我现在不是个不可靠的叙述者。但如果,比方说,在飞机上,有人问我是做啥的,我通常说我是个编辑。
But the main reason I say I'm an editor is because it's true. Now, it's the job of all therapists to help people edit, but what's interesting about my specific role as Dear Therapist is that when I edit, I'm not just editing for one person. I'm trying to teach a whole group of readers how to edit, using one letter each week as the example. 但我说我是个编辑的主要原因是因为这是真的。所有咨询师的工作是帮助人们编辑,但我作为《亲爱的咨询师》这一特殊角色的有趣之处是当我编辑时,我不仅为一个人编辑,而是在尝试教一群读者如何编辑。通过每周使用一封信作为案例。
The first is freedom, and the second is change. And when I edit, those are the themes that I start with. So, let's take a look at freedom for a second. Our stories about freedom go like this: we believe, in general, that we have an enormous amount of freedom. 第一个是自由,第二个是改变。当我编辑时,这些是我开始的主题。那么,让我们看下“自由”。我们关于自由的故事往往是这样开始的:我相信,总的来说,我们拥有很多自由。
Now, there's a cartoon that I think is a perfect example of what's really going on in these stories. The cartoon shows a prisoner shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out. But on the right and the left, it's open. No bars. The prisoner isn't in jail. That's most of us. 有个漫画我认为真实呈现了这些故事中真正发生的情况。这个漫画展现了一个不断在摇动铁栏的囚犯,拼命地想出去。但监狱的左右两边,是开放的,没有铁栏。这个囚犯不在牢笼里。那就是我们大多数人。
And that's the other common theme that I see in our stories: change. Those stories sound like this: a person says, "I want to change." But what they really mean is, "I want another character in the story to change." Therapists describe this dilemma as: "If the queen had balls, she'd be the king." I mean --那就是另一个在故事中常见的主题“改变”。这些故事往往听起俩是这样的:一个人说,“我想要改变。”但他们真正的意思是,“我想要故事中的另一个角色做出改变。”咨询师把这种窘境描述为:“如果皇后有种,她就是国王。”我意思是——
It makes no sense, right? Why wouldn't we want the protagonist, who's the hero of the story, to change? Well, it might be because change, even really positive change, involves a surprising amount of loss. Loss of the familiar. 这不就是废话嘛,对吧?我们为什么不想让主角故事中的英雄,去改变?这可能是因为改变,即便是一个非常积极的改变,涉及无法想象的损失。失去熟悉感。
To write a new chapter is to venture into the unknown. It's to stare at a blank page. And as any writer will tell you, there's nothing more terrifying than a blank page. But here's the thing. Once we edit our story, the next chapter becomes much easier to write. 谱写新的篇章需要勇敢地探索未知。是要盯着空白页。正如任何作家会告诉你的,没有什么比空白页更可怕的了。但这是问题所在。一旦我们开始编辑我们的故事,书写下一章节就会变得容易多了。
So I want to go back to the letter from the woman, about the affair. She asked me what she should do. Now, I have this word taped up in my office: ultracrepidarianism. The habit of giving advice or opinions outside of one's knowledge or competence. 于是我想要回到那个女士关于外遇的邮件,她问我她应该怎么做。我把这个短句贴在了我的办公室:没有知识的意见是危险的(ultracrepidarianism)。在自己知识或能力范围之外提供建议或意见的习惯。
So what I want to do is I want to edit this woman's letter together, right here, as a way to show how we can all revise our stories. And I want to start by asking you to think of a story that you're telling yourself right now that might not be serving you well.所以我想要做的是在这里一起编辑这位女士的来信,来展示我们能够如何修正我们的故事。我想从让你们想一个你们告诉自己的,但却对自己毫无益处的故事开始。
For instance, if the woman who wrote me that letter told her friends what happened, they would probably offer her what's called "idiot compassion." Now, in idiot compassion, we go along with the story, we say, "You're right, that's so unfair," 比如,倘若那个给我写信的女士告诉她朋友发生了什么,她们可能会给她提供所谓的“白痴同情”建议。现在,带着愚蠢的同情心,我们跟着故事走,我们说,“你说的对,这不公平,”
We say, "Yeah, you're right, he's a jerk," when a friend tells us that her boyfriend broke up with her, even though we know that there are certain ways she tends to behave in relationships, like the incessant texting or the going through his drawers, that tend to lead to this outcome. We see the problem, it's like, if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, it might be you.我们说,“是的,你说的对,他是个混蛋,”当一个朋友告诉我们她男朋友和她分手了,尽管我们知道她在恋情中的一些行为,比如不停地发短信或者翻他的抽屉,容易导致这种结果。我们能看到问题,这有点像,如果你去的每个酒吧都有打架场面发生的话,那可能是你的问题。
In order to be good editors, we need to offer wise compassion, not just to our friends, but to ourselves. This is what's called -- I think the technical term might be -- "delivering compassionate truth bombs." And these truth bombs are compassionate, because they help us to see what we've left out of the story.要成为好的编辑,我们需要提供明智的同情,不仅对我们的朋友,而且对我们自己。这就是所谓的——专业名词为——“传递同情的真相炸弹”。这些真相炸弹是具有同情的,因为它们帮助我们看见我们在故事中遗漏的东西。
The truth is, we don't know if this woman's husband is having an affair, or why their sex life changed two years ago, or what those late-night phone calls are really about. And it might be that because of her history, she's writing a singular story of betrayal, but there's probably something else that she's not willing to let me, in her letter, or maybe even herself, to see. 真相是,我们不知道这位女士的丈夫是否出轨,或者为什么他们的性生活在两年前发生了改变,或者这些深夜电话真正是因为什么。这还可能是由于她的过去,她在写仅仅关于背叛的故事,但可能也有其他事情,她在邮件中不想让我或者甚至她自己,看见的。
So, I want to read you one more letter. And it goes like this.所以,我想要给你们再读一封信。它是这样的。
"Dear Therapist, I need help with my wife. Lately, everything I do irritates her, even small things, like the noise I make when I chew. At breakfast, I noticed that she even tries to secretly put extra milk in my granola so it won't be as crunchy."“亲爱的咨询师,我跟我妻子需要帮助。最近,我做的每件事都让她生气,即便很小的事情,比如我咀嚼的声音。早餐时,我注意到她甚至偷偷地往我的麦片里加牛奶,所以它不会那么脆。”
"I feel like she became critical of me after my father died two years ago. I was very close with him, and her father left when she was young, so she couldn't relate to what I was going through.“两年前在我父亲去世后,我感到她对我来说变得越加重要了。我曾跟父亲非常亲近,她父亲在她很小时就离开了她,所以她无法理解我所经历的一切。
OK. So, what you probably picked up on is that this is the same story I read you earlier, just told from another narrator's point of view. Her story was about a husband who's cheating, his story is about a wife who can't understand his grief. 好了。所以你们可能注意到了这是我早先给你们读的同个故事,只是从另一个叙述者的视角来讲的。她的故事是一个出轨的丈夫,他的故事是一个无法理解他伤痛的妻子。
What would happen if you looked at your story and wrote it from another person's point of view? What would you see now from this wider perspective? That's why, when I see people who are depressed, I sometimes say, "You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now," because depression distorts our stories in a very particular way. 如果你看着你的故事并从另一个人的视角来写同样的故事,会怎样?从这更广阔的视角中你现在会看到什么?这也是为什么,当我看到人们沮丧时,我有时候说:“你不是此刻跟你谈话的最好人选”。因为抑郁会以一种特定的方式扭曲我们的故事。
I have a confession to make. I wrote the husband's version of the letter I read you. You have no idea how much time I spent debating between granola and pita chips, by the way. I wrote it based on all of the alternative narratives that I've seen over the years, not just in my therapy practice, but also in my column. 我得坦白。我刚读给你们的丈夫版本,是我写的。顺便,你们不知道我花了多长时间在麦片和皮塔饼之间挣扎选择。我写这个是基于我过去这些年所看到的所有叙事故事的“替代版本”。不仅在咨询师的工作中,而且也在我的专栏中。
Now, sometimes it happens that I see people who are really stuck, and they're really invested in their stuckness. We call them help-rejecting complainers. I'm sure you know people like this. 有时,我看到人们真的被困住了,他们极其投入于自己的停滞不前。我们称他们为“拒绝帮助的抱怨者”。你们肯定认识这样的人。
What they're really rejecting is an edit to their story of misery and stuckness. And so, with these people, I usually take a different approach. And what I do is I say something else. I say to them, "We're all going to die." I bet you're really glad I'm not your therapist right now. 他们真正拒绝的是对他们悲惨和停滞的生活进行编辑。于是,对于这些人,我通常采用不同的做法。我用的方法是说点不同的事情。我跟他们说,“我们都会死去。”我打赌你很高兴我现在不是你的咨询师。
Now, most of us aren't help-rejecting complainers, or at least we don't believe we are. But it's a role that is so easy to slip into when we feel anxious or angry or vulnerable. So the next time you're struggling with something, remember, we're all going to die.现在,我们大部分人不是拒绝帮助的抱怨者,或者至少我们不相信自己是。当我们感到焦虑、愤怒,或脆弱时,我们非常容易把自己带入这个角色。所以下次当你挣扎于某件事时,记住,我们都将要死去。
And then pull out your editing tools and ask yourself: what do I want my story to be? And then, go write your masterpiece.然后拿起你的编辑工具去问自己:我想要自己的故事是怎样的?然后,写下自己的大作。
Thank you.谢谢
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