Halfway through the sentence I heard it. The tone. Measured, tidy, a little wry, the voice you’d use for a documentary about someone else’s bad week. I was telling a friend about something difficult that had happened to me, and I was narrating it like a stranger.
That’s when it landed. I’d been doing this for years.
Most of the advice about emotional wellbeing assumes the problem is that people feel their lives too intensely and need tools to calm down. The research I spent years reading in my postdoc pointed the other way for a lot of us. The problem wasn’t that the feelings were too loud. It was that I’d gotten so good at putting a pane of glass between me and my own life that I’d forgotten the glass was there.
The trick that stops working
There’s a real and useful body of work on what psychologists call self-distancing. When you’re upset, referring to yourself in the third person, using your own name instead of “I”, genuinely helps you regulate. Work on third-person self-talk shows that this kind of talk reduces emotional reactivity without even engaging the brain’s cognitive control networks. It’s almost effortless. That’s part of what makes it so attractive.
Follow-up work at Miami University has kept replicating the core finding: psychological distance makes hard feelings more manageable. Building on this framework, self-distancing has been linked to wiser reasoning and better heart rate variability. It’s not a parlour trick. It works.
The question nobody asks is what happens when the trick becomes the default setting.
When distance becomes a room you live in
Distance is a tool. Tools are meant to be picked up and put down. The thing I didn’t notice happening to me, and I think it happens to a lot of people in their thirties who learned early that composure was a survival skill, was that I stopped putting the tool down.
Every story about my own life got filtered through a narrator’s voice. Funny when it could be. Analytical when it couldn’t. Warm, even. But always a step removed from the person the story was happening to.
Psychologists have a word for the more extreme version of this: depersonalisation. The DSM-5 reclassified it in 2013 and it describes a persistent sense of observing your own life from outside it, as if you’re watching yourself on a screen. I’m not suggesting most people narrating their lives at dinner parties meet clinical criteria. But the spectrum is real, and a lot of us sit further along it than we’d like to admit.
The tell is in the tone
Here’s what I started listening for, in myself and then in friends.
The tone people use to describe their own lives, versus the tone they’d use for a stranger’s. If those two tones are identical, something has quietly gone wrong. Not catastrophically. Just quietly.
A friend of mine tells stories about her mother’s illness the way a TED speaker would. Beats in the right places. A gentle punchline at the end. If I hadn’t known her for a decade I’d think she was describing a novel she’d read. She isn’t performing for me. She’s doing the only thing she knows how to do with feelings that size, which is to turn them into something she can hand to someone else without either of them getting hurt.
I’ve been that friend. I still am, on bad days.
Why the distance feels like depth
The seductive thing about narrating your life from the outside is that it looks like self-awareness. It feels like wisdom. You can describe your patterns, your attachment style, your childhood, your trauma responses, with the calm precision of a case study. You sound, to yourself and everyone else, like someone who has done the work.
Silicon Canals has covered this before. The way observation can quietly become a shelter that thoughtful people forget how to leave. That framing landed hard when I first read it, because the shelter metaphor is exact. It’s warm in there. Nothing can reach you. You can see the weather but you don’t have to be in it.
The cost, though, is that nothing can reach you.
What the research on intimacy actually shows
The data on close relationships is boringly consistent. Emotional intimacy, which Healthline’s recent overview defines as the willingness to share what you actually think and feel rather than a curated version, is one of the strongest predictors of relationship quality, life satisfaction and self-esteem we have. Intimacy has been found central to relationship quality, linked to sexual desire, and associated with lower sexual distress in older adults. The mechanism isn’t complicated. People feel close to people who let them in. If the version of you that shows up at dinner is a well-edited biographical film of yourself, your friends are bonding with the film, not you. They might love the film. That’s not the same thing. And I don’t think most people narrate their lives from a distance because they don’t want closeness. I think they do it because somewhere along the line, the raw material got packaged so often that they lost access to it.
How the packaging gets installed
A few things teach you to narrate from outside.
One is being the kid who had to explain what was happening at home to an adult who needed the short version. You learn early that the useful version of a feeling is the one you can hand over cleanly. The messy version gets nobody anywhere.
Another is being praised for being articulate about hard things. If people respond to your composure more than to your distress, composure becomes the thing you reach for when distress arrives. I wrote recently about the loneliness that belongs to warm, well-liked people who are so reliably fine that no one thinks to ask if they are. This is adjacent. The fine-ness and the narrative distance feed each other.
A third is professional training. Therapists, doctors, journalists, academics — anyone whose job involves turning human experience into sentences for other people — gets very good at this move. My dad was a GP in a small town in New South Wales and I watched him do it for decades. It’s a kindness to patients. It can become a prison at the dinner table.
Signs the distance has stopped serving you
A few things I started noticing in myself, offered not as a checklist but as handrails.
You describe events in the same register regardless of how much they mattered. The breakup and the parking ticket get the same wry narration.
Friends tell you, often kindly, that you’re handling it well when you don’t feel like you’re handling anything. You’re just describing it well. Those are different verbs.
You can’t remember the last time a friend acknowledged how difficult something sounded in their response to you. Because you didn’t give them the version that sounded hard. You gave them the version that sounded interesting.
You notice a kind of emotional lag. The thing happens. You narrate it. Three weeks later, the feeling catches up with you in the shower and you can’t place where it came from. Delayed, misplaced reactions can signal that your regulation is tipping into suppression. The difference between regulating and suppressing is whether the feeling got processed or just rerouted.
What closes the gap
I don’t have a neat five-step answer. What I have is a small set of experiments that have shifted something for me over the last couple of months.
The first is noticing the register. When I catch myself narrating, I try to stop mid-sentence and ask: if a friend told me this story in this tone, would I believe them when they said they were fine? Usually the answer is no. That gap is where the real sentence lives.
The second is writing it down before telling anyone. Narrative expressive writing, particularly after difficult life events, can improve heart rate variability and blood pressure months later. The processing seems to need a private, ungoverned version before the public one. If the first draft of your feelings is the one you say out loud to a friend, you’ve skipped a step.
The third is asking for something specific. I’ve learned to ask my partner to acknowledge the difficulty of what I’m sharing before moving to solutions. It feels ridiculous the first time. It works.
The fourth is sitting with friends who don’t need the polished version. These are rarer than they should be, and protecting them is, as far as I can tell, the single most important thing I do for my mental health that isn’t walking the dog.
What I got wrong about the events
For years I thought the problem was the events themselves. The hard week, the ended friendship, the bit of grief I hadn’t tended to. I thought if I could just process the content, the discomfort would lift.
The content was never really the problem. Plenty of people have had harder weeks than mine and felt more at home in their own lives than I did in mine. The problem was the narrator. The specific, practiced voice that turned every lived minute into something I was describing to someone else, even when no one was there.
The distance was doing a job once. It kept me upright in situations that needed uprightness. I’m grateful to it. I just don’t always know how to set it down.
Last week a friend asked how I was, and I heard the documentary voice come on before I’d even finished the first sentence. I caught it. I tried to start again. What came out the second time wasn’t much better, just a slightly less polished version of the same evasion. Maybe that counts as progress. Maybe it doesn’t. I’m still listening for the moment the tone drops and something underneath it gets a turn to speak, and I don’t know yet what that voice sounds like, or whether I’d recognise it if it arrived.
Feature image by Zanyar Ibrahim on Pexels
