Honor the Story, Follow the Track
Two teachings about the stories we tell ourselves have circulated in wellness and spiritual circles for a long time, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first teaches that your story is a prison. Any narrative you tell about yourself, especially one shaped by grievance or injury, generates suffering. The work is to question the story, see through it, and let it dissolve. Once you do, the suffering it carried dissolves with it.
The second teaches that your story is a victory. To name what happened to you, especially when you have been silenced, is an act of liberation. Telling is how the body metabolizes experience. To declare stories inauthentic is to keep wounded people imprisoned inside undigested experience.
Both teachings carry something true. Both, taken to their endpoint, can do harm.
What each gets right
The first teaching is right that some stories become traps. I have sat with many people whose grievance narratives have hardened into compulsive loops. The same story, rehearsed for years. The same villain. The same wound. The same role for the self: the wronged party, the betrayed one, the one who got hurt. Watching from outside, it is easy to see that the story is doing something to the storyteller, not just describing what happened. Loosening such stories can be real medicine.
The second teaching is right that stories also liberate. Many of the people I have worked with spent years being told their experience did not count. For them, finally finding language for what happened is not ego attachment. It is re-entry into reality. The same is true at scale. Whole peoples have been silenced by official narratives, and the act of telling the suppressed story is how erasure gets resisted.
So both teachings are pointing at something real. The problem is that each, pushed to its limit, becomes its own kind of harm.
What each costs
Taken to its endpoint, the first teaching arrives at the position that no story is authentic, that the self telling the story is itself illusion, and that the path forward is to drop all of it. This sounds liberating until you notice who can afford to teach it. The voices whose stories are already secured by institutions can comfortably announce that storytelling is delusional. The voices that were never recorded cannot. To tell a trauma survivor that her account of what happened is a story she should release is not wisdom. It is a second harm dressed in spiritual clothing.
Taken to its endpoint, the second teaching arrives at the position that the act of telling settles the question of truth. Once a story has been spoken, it becomes unchallengeable. This sounds protective until you remember that every story is told by a particular person in a particular body with a particular history. Every account is partial. The fact that someone has been silenced does not mean their reconstruction of events captures the whole picture. Two people can be in the same room and walk away with two real, incompatible accounts.
So the first teaching dissolves the story so completely that the storyteller disappears. The second defends the story so completely that the storyteller becomes the final word. Both lose something the body and the relationship are trying to do.
Three stances along the trail
In my own work, I have found it useful to notice three stances people occupy with their own stories.
The first is the victim stance. Here the story is so fully inhabited that it is mistaken for reality itself. The role of wronged party is not just something the person feels, it is who they are. The story tells them who they are and who the other is, and any evidence that does not fit gets filtered out. Dissolution teachings aim at this stance and try to bypass it. But bypass is not metabolism. The wound does not heal because you have been told it is unreal.
The second is the survivor stance. Here the story has been claimed, named, and honored. The silenced voice has spoken. This is necessary work and good work. Many people need years to move from victim to survivor, and they should not be hurried through it. But this stance, too, has its risk. If you stop here, the trail becomes well-worn. The grievance gets rehearsed. The role of "the one who survived this" can become identity rather than passage.
The third is the tracker stance. Here you can hold the story as your report, recognize it as one lensed account of something real that happened, and remain curious about what else is present. The tracker does not dissolve the story. The tracker also does not enthrone it. The tracker honors it and follows it.
The progression is not linear, and no stance is final. Most of us move between them depending on the conflict, the moment, our regulation. But naming the three makes a path visible. Dissolution teachings want to skip you straight from victim to enlightened, past the survivor stance entirely. Defense teachings want to protect the survivor and never move beyond. The tracker stance does what both were trying to do at their best. It honors the experience without imprisoning the experiencer.
What this looks like in conflict
This matters most when you are sitting across from someone whose story does not match yours.
The victim stance, sitting across from another victim stance, escalates. Each one tracks the other as threat. Each looks for evidence that confirms the story they already hold. Nothing new can enter.
The survivor stance, sitting across from another survivor stance, hardens into competition. Whose story counts more? Whose injury is more legitimate? Each is defending what they fought to claim, and the conversation becomes about establishing whose account gets to be the final word.
The tracker stance, sitting across from another tracker, opens something different. Both can hold their own story as report. Both can recognize that the other is doing the same. Neither has to surrender their experience for the other's experience to be honored. Two lensed perceivers, each acknowledging the other's lensing, can find a way forward that does not require agreement on the facts of what happened.
But most of the time, the stances do not match. One person is still inside the victim story while the other has begun to track. One has just claimed their survivor voice and is not ready to set it down, while the other is asking what else is present. Mismatch is the ordinary terrain of difficult conversation, not the exception.
When stances do not match, the burden does not fall on the more activated person to catch up. It falls on whoever can hold their own ground without needing the other to be somewhere they cannot yet be. A tracker sitting across from someone in victim stance is not there to rescue them or guide them through a stance transition. The tracker's work is to acknowledge what the other is reporting, regulate their own nervous system, and stay present without collapsing into matching activation.
Sometimes that is enough to let the other person settle and begin tracking too. Sometimes it is not. Some conversations cannot become tracking conversations, at least not yet, because the other person is not available for the work. Recognizing that limit is itself a form of tracking. It tells you something true about where you both are, and it spares you the trap of trying to force a conversation the moment cannot hold.
This is the gift of acknowledgment. It is not adjudication. It does not settle whose memory is more accurate. It validates that each person walked their trail through this terrain, that each carries a coherent account of what happened to them, that both are human and both are worth meeting.
You can disagree with another person's interpretation and still acknowledge their experience. You can stand fully in your own truth and still recognize that theirs is also real to them. That double holding, your story and theirs, both partial, both deserving of attention, is the move that lets two trackers stay in the same room.
The practice
Honor the story. Follow the track.
When a storied feeling arrives, the kind of feeling that carries an interpretation about cause, you do not have to dissolve it. You do not have to enthrone it either. You honor it as a real feeling that marks the spot where something stirred. You recognize that the story it carries is one report from one lensed perceiver in a particular moment. And you follow the track.
Following does not mean leaving the story behind. It means asking what else is present. What feelings sit alongside it. What needs the story is pointing toward. What you actually want from the situation, aside from the urge to be right about it.
When you can do this for yourself, you become available to do it for another. The room can hold both stories without collapsing into either one. That is where repair becomes possible. Not because you finally agreed. Because you both stayed long enough to be tracked.
Continue the Journey
Tracking Triggers is more than a book. It is a living exploration of how we move from reactivity to responsiveness.
The Inner Trackers are a small community walking this path together, receiving occasional reflections, new journal entries, and a first look at the work as it unfolds.
If this resonates with you, I'd be glad to have you join us.