7. Storyteller Imprinting

If we are doing the Storyteller expression at the imprinting level, we are great talkers and believe ourselves to always be the life of the party. Being the center of attention is the most important thing in the world to us. We believe that our power is in keeping groups working together, and that our words shape people’s experiences. We also believe that people never get bored with what we have to say, and that dogs and children adore us. The most important people we know are people who can influence others. We see ourselves in this group. We believe that we can sell anything to anybody anytime, and that people cannot exclude us when we wish to be included. Unfortunately, our self-absorption with the need to communicate keeps us from listening and being present with others, which ultimately drives them away. It is recommended that Storyteller imprinted individuals not take jobs where they have to be liked to be successful.

Level One Storyteller Imprinting (Society’s Social Imprinting Process)

Level One Storyteller imprinting is about becoming identified with our ability to speak without really saying anything. We call this process oration because we fall in love with our own voice and feel compelled to fill any uncomfortable silences with words. What we need to do to overcome this is learn to embrace the silence within us and be able to be silent with people around us. Even Storyteller imprints feel that others do not listen to them and therefore we have to overcome the resistance others have to hearing us. So we feel justified in raising our voices, talking with intensity or even demanding people shut up and listen to us. This is very ironic because usually we are the ones who are not listening to them. Overall, it would be good for us to learn to hear what we are saying in the way they are hearing it so that we can become more effective at saying things in a way that others can hear.

Level Two Storyteller Imprinting (Keeping Others From Being Right)

Level Two Storyteller imprinting comes from the belief that we have to be entertaining. In this level, we feel we have to be doing things to keep people happy around us or else they will leave us. We become attached to how others are interacting with us and if there is not a superficial way that they are interacting, we feel insecure. This is because we don’t want others to think of us as being dull or boring. Therefore, we make sure that they are busy engaging some process with us all the time. Level two Storyteller imprinting commonly shows up as feeling we have to take people to the movies, dancing, or to other interesting activities when they come to visit us. We feel compelled to treat our guests in the way our Storyteller parents would have treated them on their best days. This standard is difficult to maintain because of our unrealistic expectations about it. No matter what people say, we tend to believe that in the end they will find us wanting if we did not entertain them in every way possible.

Level Three Storyteller Imprinting (Lost in Our Imprinting)

Finally, in Level Three Storyteller imprinting we become attached to doing things with pomp and ceremony, believing we have to mark special events by making them stand out in our minds. This behavior can be seen in our attention and attachment to birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. If there isn’t a holiday, we want to make one up. This is where people who are not Storytellers attempt to keep up with the Storyteller party ethic by being more outrageous than Storytellers are. While Storytellers use ceremony to empower and enrich an energetic connection, Level three Storyteller imprints use it to justify being distracted. In this way, the imprinting is exactly the opposite of the original intent. Overall, level three Storyteller imprints seek to escape the mundane by being in our fantasies of how things would be if we didn’t have to work. We are driven to act this way in order to offset our dreary, unsatisfying and repetitive way of entertaining ourselves.

Anti-Storyteller Beliefs

1. “Loving our own voice” becomes Hating others who love the sound of their own voice. We resist others by making excuses about why we can’t hang around or interact with people who trigger our fears that we won’t be heard. In other words, we make it difficult for ourselves to spend time with people who seem to be greater talkers and listeners. We probably have past associations where this type of individual has overwhelmed and denied our creative expression, thereby wasting much of our time with them. It could also be true that we actually want to express ourselves more and have felt unable to step into this possibility. Our resentment can become more conscious when we realize that there is a natural balance between speaking and listening that is appropriate to everyone in every situation. Until we accept this possibility, we can feel at the effect of others around us.


2. “Loving our ability to entertain” becomes Denying our need to entertain others. In order to protect ourselves from feeling lost through entertaining others, we can become polarized so that we deny the humor and irony of any situation. We become serious and critical when any humor comes up because we feel it does not deal with the problems in front of us. This can lead us to becoming obsessed that things are not being taken care of or completed in a way that denies that we have an ability to define our reality the way we do. As a result, we try to discourage others from defining their reality in a way that is open-ended, believing that to do so would cause us more pain in the end.


3. “Loving ritualistic ceremony” becomes Denying pomp and ceremony. The more we feel ourselves having to conform to a pre-existing way of doing something, the more it can remind us of how we are defined by the protocol of the situation rather than our creative expression in it. When others are going through the emotions and we do not detect a creative connection with them, it concerns us that something is being lost in the situation and that we just need to loosen it up. This can bring out our rebellious nature to try to destroy the ritual because it does not reflect our true creativity within it. We feel that the expectations of others compel us to follow the outer form at the cost of our spiritual and creative expression.