The Story Beneath the Story
Why Discernment Is Essential in Navigating Our Relationship to History and Truth
In an age of heightened access to information, viral narratives, and resurfacing ancestral memory, truth is rarely simple.
This essay explores how emotional truth, historical record, and human bias intertwine, and why discernment may be the most essential—and perhaps revolutionary—tool for remembering that we have left.
As public trust in institutions wanes and long-buried histories surface, many are turning to alternative narratives in search of deeper truth. Beneath this cultural moment lies a shared longing to remember what’s been erased—ancestral wisdom, land-based knowledge, and spiritual connection.
Yet in our hunger to reclaim what was lost, we must learn to hold emotional truth and historical accuracy together, without collapsing one into the other.
The Hunger to Remember
Across social media feeds, podcasts, and independent documentaries, new interpretations of history spread rapidly—stories suggesting that what we’ve been taught is incomplete, that sacred knowledge was deliberately hidden or destroyed.
These narratives resonate because they touch something deeper than curiosity; they echo the grief of disconnection. For many, the ache isn’t about a single historical event but about centuries of severance—from belonging, from community, from a sense of the sacred woven through life itself.
For those whose lineages and ways of knowing have been suppressed or pathologized, this awakening feels like justice—a reclamation of what was denied. But the same impulse that drives remembering can also lead to oversimplification when emotional truth becomes mistaken for historical fact.
When Emotional Truth Meets Historical Fact
Take, for example, a recent viral video that frames human history as a series of deliberate “resets” by powerful elites: Rome burning the Library of Alexandria to erase divine wisdom; the Crusades as wars against knowledge; the Inquisition as a systematic targeting of healers and wisdom-keepers; and the World Wars as calculated erasures of ancient architectural truths. These stories are compelling. They feel true. But we must ask: which parts of these narratives are grounded in historical record, which are interpretive synthesis, and which may be shaped by cognitive bias or projection—responses born from valid emotions that history has been erased and rewritten?
It’s understandable that, with the gift of hindsight and the pain of ancestral memory, we might see the past through a judgmental lens. Yet discernment asks that we hold both truths at once: the justified anger toward systemic erasure, and the recognition that human perception—past and present—is always partial, shaped by bias, fear, and the limits of understanding.
Untangling the Threads of History
The destruction of the Library of Alexandria, for instance, did happen—but not in a single villainous act by Rome. Its downfall occurred in phases, over centuries, under various powers including Julius Caesar, early Christian zealots, and later Muslim rulers.
Gnostic persecution was real, but it wasn’t simply a war on mystics who believed God was within—it was entangled in complex theological and political shifts as Christianity consolidated power.
Midwives and herbalists were indeed persecuted as witches during the Inquisition and beyond, but the motivations included fear of unregulated medicine, gender control, and spiritual autonomy—not merely fear of magical power.
The Importance of Holding Complexity
We can honor emotional truth—the sense that our ancestors were silenced, our bodies regulated, our stories erased—without distorting historical fact. Myth, metaphor, and intuition are valuable ways of knowing, but they must exist in conversation with evidence and cultural context.
Otherwise, we risk doing to truth what colonial powers once did to Indigenous memory: flattening it into a single story.
The danger of many alternative histories isn’t that they’re entirely wrong—it’s that they oversimplify. They imagine a singular narrative—either a heroic conquering of “savagery,” or an orchestrated villainy behind every erasure. But history, like trauma, is layered, cumulative, and often chaotic. And truth, more often than not, lives in the in-between of extremes.
Check out Greater Good Magazine’s articles, “How to Move Beyond Outrage Toward Understanding,” and “Seven Ways to Fight Bias in Your Everyday Life” to learn more about cognitive bias & polarization.Discernment as a Form of Care
Discernment between these black-and-white perspectives of “good” and “bad” is not ignorant optimism, nor is it cynicism—it’s care.
When we ask, “What grief is this story carrying?” or “What part of me does this narrative validate?” we begin to understand why something resonates without having to accept it as literal fact. We learn to tell the difference between what is archetypally true and what is historically verifiable.
This doesn’t mean dismissing those drawn to these narratives. Most are seeking agency, connection, and understanding after generations of systemic erasure. But to truly honor that desire, we must be willing to sit in the grey areas—to say: “Yes, something has been lost. But what exactly? By whom? When? And what evidence supports this?”
Weaving Truth Back Together
This is not a call to return to sterile academic history, which itself has been shaped by power and exclusion. Rather, it’s an invitation to weave emotional truth, ancestral knowledge, critical inquiry, and mythopoetic awareness together—without collapsing them into one.
Because remembering isn’t about uncovering a perfect, fixed story. It’s about restoring relationship—to land, to body, to each other—and holding space for the humanity within our stories of the past, in all their layered complexity.
Conclusion: The Revolutionary Act of Remembering
In a world of mass forgetting, deepfakes, and misdirected blame, the act of discerned remembering is revolutionary.
When we allow both heart and mind to participate in truth-seeking—when we honour intuition and evidence, myth and memory—we cultivate a fuller, wiser understanding of what it means to know.
And that, perhaps, is the story beneath the story: not one of victory or defeat, nor of conspiracy or fact, but of courage—the courage to hold multiple truths, to listen between them, and to find the through-line of our shared humanity.
Understanding these layers of history is part of the work we do at Hidden Hues—connecting evidence, story, and emotion in embodied ways.
If this piece resonated with you, join the waitlist for Hidden Hues’ upcoming workshop series: The Fracture & the Thread where we’ll be further diving into the roots of our collective & individual manifestations of disconnection.