What does it mean that narrative editing?

You can deliberately revise your personal narrative without denying facts.

Example: You were laid off eighteen months ago. The story you have been telling is: "I got fired because I was not good enough, and now I am behind everyone my age." The facts: the company eliminated your entire department during a restructuring. You received a strong performance review three months before the layoff. You spent six months unemployed, then took a role at a smaller firm where you now lead a team. The edited narrative, using the same facts: "A restructuring forced me out of a comfortable position, which was painful and disorienting. During the six months that followed, I discovered I could tolerate far more uncertainty than I believed. The smaller firm gave me leadership responsibility two years earlier than my previous trajectory would have. The layoff was not evidence of inadequacy — it was a structural event that, once I stopped interpreting it as a verdict on my worth, became the inflection point where I moved from executing other people's plans to directing my own."

Try this: Choose one event from your past that you consistently narrate in a way that diminishes you — a failure, a loss, a period you describe with shame or regret. Write the current version in two to three sentences exactly as you would tell it to a friend. Now write three factual details about that period that your current narrative omits — things that happened, skills you demonstrated, people you helped, or lessons that only became visible later. Using all the facts (the painful ones and the omitted ones together), write a revised narrative of the same event in four to six sentences. The revision must not deny anything that happened. It must include dimensions of the experience your dominant story has been editing out. Read both versions aloud and notice which one you feel in your body. The version that produces less constriction and more openness in your chest is closer to a complete account of what actually happened.