Competing Truths: How to Choose a Helpful Story Without Pretending It’s the Only One

A woman sat across from me last year and said something I have heard hundreds of times, in hundreds of different wordings: “I just need to know which version is true.”

She was talking about a situation at work — a conversation with a colleague that had gone sideways. But she could have been talking about a relationship, a parenting decision, a career crossroads, or that thing she said at dinner three weeks ago that still wakes her at 2am. The content barely matters. The structure is always the same: two possible readings of the same event, and a desperate need to collapse them into one.

Because your brain wants one story. It is built to simplify. It takes the buzzing, contradictory, irreducibly messy reality of any given moment and compresses it into a single narrative — a headline it can act on quickly. That compression is not a flaw. It is how you get through the day without being paralysed by possibility.

But it has a cost. The single narrative feels like the whole truth. And once it does, you stop looking for the others.

Think of it this way. Your mind hates open tabs. It wants one window, full screen, filling the entire display. One interpretation. One story. One verdict. And once that window is maximised, you forget there were ever other tabs open behind it.

This final post is about learning to keep two tabs open at once. Not twenty. Not an infinite scroll of “well, anything could be true.” Two. Two competing narratives, held side by side, long enough for you to make a deliberate choice about which one to act on.

That is the skill. Not finding the right truth. Holding two and choosing the functional one.

Two People, One Event, Two Realities

Imagine two people leave the same meeting. One thinks: “That went terribly. My idea got questioned and nobody backed me up.” The other thinks: “That was a good discussion. People engaged with the idea and stress-tested it, which means they took it seriously.”

Same meeting. Same facts. Two completely different realities.

Neither person is lying. Neither is delusional. They are each constructing a narrative from the same raw material, and each narrative is defensible. The difference is not intelligence or accuracy. The difference is which assumptions each person brought into the room — and which details those assumptions made salient.

The first person assumed: questions equal criticism, silence from allies means abandonment, and a good meeting is one where everyone immediately agrees. The second person assumed: questions equal engagement, silence might mean people are thinking, and a good meeting is one where ideas get tested.

Same data. Different assumptions. Different worlds.

I see this every week in the room. Two partners describing the same weekend. Two colleagues recounting the same project. A parent and a teenager narrating the same dinner. And here is the thing that still strikes me after fifteen years: each person is telling the truth as they experienced it. The problem is not dishonesty. The problem is that experience is downstream of assumptions — and assumptions are invisible to the person holding them.

A story can feel true because it is familiar — not because it is accurate.

This is the landscape we are operating in. Not a world where one person is right and the other is wrong, but a world where multiple defensible interpretations coexist at all times, and the one you land on shapes everything downstream: your emotion, your behaviour, your relationships, your sense of yourself.

The Trap: Relativism vs Rigidity

When people first encounter this idea — that multiple truths can coexist about the same event — they tend to fall into one of two traps.

Trap one: relativism. “If everyone’s truth is equally valid, then nothing matters. There are no standards. Everything is just perspective.” This is comforting in a way — it dissolves conflict by dissolving meaning. But it also collapses accountability. If every interpretation is equally true, then nobody can ever be wrong, nobody can be held to a standard, and the concept of “better” or “worse” interpretation disappears. That is not wisdom. That is intellectual surrender.

Trap two: rigidity. “My interpretation is reality. The way I see it is the way it is. If others see it differently, they are wrong or uninformed.” This feels strong. It provides certainty. But it is fragile, because it cannot accommodate new data without cracking. Rigid interpretations do not bend. They break. And when they break, the person breaks with them.

I watch this second one play out most often with the people who are used to being right. High achievers. People who have built their confidence on accurate judgement. When you have been right about most things for most of your life, the idea that your interpretation might be one of several defensible readings does not feel like humility. It feels like weakness. Like someone asking you to pretend you are less perceptive than you are.

But that is not what is being asked. Not even close.

The third position — the one this entire series has been building toward — is neither relativism nor rigidity. It is what I would call defended subjectivity. It goes like this: “I know my interpretation is partial. I know other interpretations exist and may be equally defensible. But I have examined my assumptions, weighed the evidence, considered the consequences, and I am choosing this narrative as my operating framework — for now — because it is both justifiable and functional. And I am willing to update it when new data arrives.”

That is not wishy-washy. That is structurally humble and operationally decisive. You hold uncertainty in one hand and commitment in the other.

Assumptions Are the Hidden Levers

Here is something most people miss, and it is perhaps the single most important observation in this entire series. Subjectivity does not enter at the level of the final conclusion. It enters much earlier — at the level of the assumptions you did not notice you were making.

Consider the sentence: “That conversation went badly.”

That sounds like a fact. It does not feel like an interpretation. But embedded inside it are at least three hidden assumptions:

• That the other person’s tone meant disapproval (assumption: tone = intention).
• That the silence afterwards meant they were upset (assumption: silence = judgement).
• That being questioned meant being criticised (assumption: questions = attacks).

Each of those assumptions is debatable. Each could be wrong. But they are doing the real work. The “fact” that the conversation went badly is downstream of assumptions that were never examined.

This is where the leverage is. You cannot change what happened. You can identify the assumptions you brought into the room and ask whether they are the only defensible ones. Almost always, they are not.

I sometimes ask clients to do an exercise I call the assumption audit. Take the sentence you are most convinced of — the one that feels like bedrock fact — and circle every word that is doing interpretive work. “They clearly don’t respect me.” The word “clearly” is carrying an enormous amount of weight there. It is converting an uncertain inference into a certainty. And you probably did not notice it doing that, because certainty does not announce itself. It just settles in quietly and starts rearranging the furniture.

The mind confuses coherence with correctness. A story that hangs together well feels true — even when it is built on unexamined assumptions.

The Two Narratives Skill

This is the core teaching of this post, and in many ways, the core teaching of the series. Everything before this — the distortion channels, the internalisation mechanisms, the filter protocols — was preparation for this single skill.

The skill is simple to describe and difficult to execute under emotional load. Here it is:

When you notice yourself locked onto a single interpretation, deliberately generate at least one alternative narrative that is equally defensible. Then compare the two on three dimensions:

1. Evidence-fit. What facts does each narrative explain well? What facts does it struggle to account for? A narrative that requires you to ignore or dismiss multiple data points is a weaker narrative — even if it feels more convincing.
2. Assumptions. What must be true for each narrative to hold? Write these out. The narrative with fewer hidden, untestable assumptions is usually the more honest one.
3. Consequence. What does each story make you do next? What behaviour does it drive? And where does that behaviour lead over the next week, the next month, the next year?

Then ask the central question: “Would someone reasonable, looking at this same situation, be able to convey a different but equally truthful impression?”

If the answer is yes — and it almost always is — then you have room to choose. Not the narrative that feels best. Not the one that hurts least. The one that is at least as justifiable and more functional.

The word “functional” is important. It does not mean “positive.” It means: which narrative leads to behaviour that moves you toward the life you actually want? Sometimes the functional narrative is uncomfortable. Sometimes it requires you to have a difficult conversation, or sit with uncertainty, or acknowledge that you contributed to a problem. Functional does not mean flattering. It means useful for the direction you want to go.

Three Examples in Depth

These are composites from clinical work. The details are changed. The patterns are real.

Notice something about all three examples. Narrative B is never “everything is fine.” It is never denial. It is a different interpretation of the same facts — one that is at least as honest and leads to behaviour that is more sustainable. That is the standard. Not positivity. Sustainability.

The Competing Truths Scorecard

The Assumption Hunt

The Self-Narrative Version

Everything above has been about how you interpret situations and other people. But the most consequential place this plays out is in the story you tell about yourself.

Your internal narrative about who you are — your capabilities, your limitations, your trajectory — is a competing-truths situation too. That story was built from evidence, but it was built from selected evidence, and the selection was not neutral. It was shaped by every distortion channel this series has mapped: partial truths, framing effects, anchors, labels, predictions that became self-fulfilling.

Consider someone who believes “I am not the kind of person who handles confrontation well.” That is Narrative A. It was built from real evidence: a difficult conversation that went badly five years ago, a parent who modelled avoidance, a pattern of choosing peace over clarity. All real. All true.

But Narrative B exists too: “I have avoided confrontation because I was told early on that it meant something was wrong with me. But the times I have actually had difficult conversations — really had them — I have often been surprised by how well they went. I may have an undeveloped capacity that I have been avoiding rather than a fixed limitation.”

Also defensible. Also supported by evidence — those moments of directness that worked out, the quiet courage that showed up when it mattered, the relationships that deepened after honesty rather than collapsing.

The single-narrative person operates on A. They avoid difficult conversations. They defer. They confirm the identity every day through avoidance. The two-narrative person holds both: “I may genuinely struggle with confrontation. I may also have capacity I have never tested because I was too busy believing the first story. I will hold both and see what happens when I actually try.”

This is not positive thinking. It is honest thinking. It is the refusal to let a single narrative — however well-evidenced — foreclose on possibilities that are equally well-evidenced but less visible because they were never given room.

What This Is Not

Choose the story that makes you braver and more accurate — not just the one that makes you feel better.

Frequently Asked Questions

“But what if my negative story is correct?”

Then the experiment gives you data. The Scorecard does not ask you to reject your default narrative — it asks you to test it against an alternative. If the evidence strongly favours the painful version, you act on the painful version. But here is what I have observed across thousands of hours of clinical work: most anxiety-driven narratives are exaggerated forecasts dressed in certainty. They are worst-case scenarios presented as base rates. The Scorecard does not change the facts. It reveals whether your narrative is built on all the facts or just the threatening ones.

“How do I avoid naive optimism?”

The functional test requires justifiability, not positivity. Your alternative narrative must be defensible — grounded in real evidence, built on testable assumptions. “Everything will be fine” is not a competing truth. It is a wish. “Based on my track record and the available evidence, this is more likely to go adequately than catastrophically” is a competing truth. The criterion is: at least as justifiable, and more functional. If it is not justifiable, it fails the test — no matter how good it feels.

“What if I can generate endless narratives?”

Two is enough. The point is not to catalogue every possible interpretation — that way lies rumination in a clever disguise. The point is to break the monopoly of the default narrative by introducing one serious competitor. Once you have two — your default and one honest alternative — you have enough to make a deliberate choice. Then choose, and test. If the test produces data that changes the picture, update. You do not need a hundred tabs open. You need two.

“Is this not just overthinking?”

No, and this distinction matters. Overthinking is looping through the same narrative repeatedly, gathering reassurance, never landing. It goes in circles. This is ten minutes of deliberate, structured analysis — then action. The Scorecard has an endpoint: “my functional choice for now.” You write it down, you act on it, and you move. Overthinking avoids action. This tool demands it.

“When does this become something I should bring to a professional?”

When the same Narrative A keeps winning. When you do the Scorecard and you can see intellectually that Narrative B is more defensible, but you cannot feel it. When the emotional charge of the default story is so strong that no amount of written analysis loosens its grip. That is not a failure of the tool — it is the tool doing its job by showing you where the deeper work is. The Scorecard reveals the pattern. Working with someone who understands this territory helps you change it.

Key Takeaways