What does it mean that contamination narratives?

Stories where good experiences are ruined by bad events produce more helplessness.

Example: Marcus earned a promotion he had worked toward for three years. For the first week, he felt genuine pride — the recognition was deserved, his colleagues congratulated him, and the new role aligned with his long-term career goals. Then his manager scheduled a meeting to discuss "transition challenges." The meeting was routine — every promotion involves adjustment — but Marcus left it feeling that the other shoe had dropped. Within days, the promotion had been rewritten in his internal narrative. "I got promoted, but now they expect more than I can deliver." "It felt good for a moment, but now I have to prove myself all over again." "Good things never just stay good." The pride did not fade naturally. It was actively contaminated — overwritten by a story in which the promotion became the setup for inevitable failure. A month later, when a friend asked how the new role was going, Marcus said, "It is fine, I guess. More stress than anything." The actual experience of promotion — the competence it reflected, the doors it opened — had been narratively erased. What remained was the contamination sequence: something good happened, and then it was ruined. Not by any external event. By the story Marcus told about it.

Try this: Identify three positive experiences from the past year — a success, a connection, or a moment of genuine satisfaction. For each one, write two versions. First, write the version you currently tell yourself about this experience. Be honest. Include whatever qualifications, "but" clauses, or subsequent events you attach to the memory. Second, write just the positive experience itself — what happened, what it felt like, what it meant in the moment before any subsequent narration. Now compare. For each experience, ask: Did I attach a contamination sequence? Did the "but then" clause appear? If so, identify the specific mechanism. Was it a genuinely negative follow-up event, or was it the anticipation of something negative that had not yet occurred? Was it a reinterpretation of the positive event itself? Was it a comparison to someone else or to an idealized standard? Write one paragraph about the pattern you notice across the three experiences. You are not trying to eliminate contamination sequences — some reflect genuine hardship. You are trying to see them, so you can distinguish the ones that reflect reality from the ones your narrative machinery generates automatically.