In The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I share fictional stories throughout the book based on a made-up couple, Steve and Lauren. However, these stories are based on reality and the hundreds of clients I’ve seen and counseled over the last decade.
In Chapter 7, “Stories in the Dark,” I describe how Steve grew up watching Westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or any film with The Duke. As a young child, he ingested these stories on a consistent basis, which helped him make sense of the world around him. He wanted to be the hero who saves the damsel in distress. He wanted to grow up to be the kind of resolute, moral man he saw in those films.
A few states away, his future wife Lauren was likewise ingesting certain kinds of stories on an almost daily basis as a child. She’d probably seen Sleeping Beauty fifty times before she was ten. She sang the songs from the movie every day. She wanted to be the kind of woman whose beauty and talents would be able to woo any man.
But then Steve grew up and put away his childhood fantasy of being a cowboy, and Lauren grew up and put away her childhood fantasy of being a princess.
Or did they?
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