Nothing is more dangerous than the stories we tell ourselves to defend how/why something happened to us. Dangerous because of the lack of objectivity in our perspective.
We both tell and hear these stories often. Rarely, do I ever hear anyone say, simply, that it was their mistake or that they are at fault, That they over-estimated the possibility that something else would happen.
Our self defense stories tend to be all reflex with little thought given to first testing their logic. They can be a very powerful misguided force in our lives, because I see people base their next action on their very self biased story that is based on terrible perceptions of reality.
There is an urge for our stories to portray perfect clarity as to the motives other people used in behaving the way they did without ever talking to them. Quickly, we defend our next few actions based on this same perfect clarity of describing the future as if it was certain. How absurd is our belief that we can accurately predict the future? Yet we do it all of the time when our future is described in our self-defense stories.
All of this makes our self defense stories very risky. They misguide us into bad decisions that are based more on emotion. Our self defense stories are filled with misinformation that we mistakenly believe as truth.
It is difficult to get out of this trap of self defense stories that we tell ourselves. We need to either continually ask ourselves could their be other reasons or stories that could also explain what happened or we need to run quickly to our best friends, that give us comfort, while challenging us to see where our self defense stories may not be accurate.
Or simply test what you believe or want to do before going into it with full force. Find or search for other information that will either confirm or dis confirm your beliefs. All of this will take more work than simply surviving your current situation that has generated your self defense story.
This is one of the few times that doubt may serve us well. For once we create doubt around our self defense story and the certain future that we have included in our narrative, the more options we have to test or validate them to see how accurate our beliefs are quickly before we make things worse.