Tag: stories

How your stories hurt you

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Change them instead.

Do you know that facts don’t hurt?

The circumstances of our lives have no effect on us until they encounter our mind – meaning, until we interpret them – and we attach meaning to them. We aren’t sad about someone dying until our mind registers the fact. The person’s death, which may have happened days ago, has no effect on us at all. It could be that at the same moment they died, we were laughing at a joke because our mind wasn’t aware of what just happened.

In this situation, we can separate out the facts from the thoughts. It’s less accurate to say, “I was devastated when they died.” It’s more accurate to say, “I was devastated by what I thought about their death.” And yes, these semantics matter. 

When we realize that our mind causes our feelings, we can be much more in control of our emotional lives. It doesn’t mean that we won’t choose to be sad when someone dies – we most likely will be. But it does mean we can decide not to be mad when something much less significant happens in our lives.

We manage our emotional lives with our thinking.

If we say, “Work stresses me out,” it’s our thoughts about work that stress us out. Although we might not be able to change our job at this very moment, we can certainly change the way we think about your job. And that will change everything.

​​We create our lives mostly with our minds. We often believe our stories so deeply that we think they’re facts when they’re not. This is fine – so long as the story isn’t painful or causing problems in our lives. But many of our stories are painful, even debilitating. Our stories can hurt us.

Here’s an example of a story from someone who’s furious with her sister-in-law:

“My sister-in-law doesn’t respect or love me. She wants me to be fat because she makes certain foods for dinner when she knows I’m working to lose weight. It’s like I don’t even want to be around her because of the awful things she does. Just this weekend, we went to her home for a visit, and she was so backhanded, so conniving by making spaghetti for dinner. I know my husband (this is his sister) doesn’t even care. He doesn’t back me up when I feel this way, and he refuses when I suggest we should confront her and stop visiting her. I think I’m going to have to give him an ultimatum. It’s either her or me. He’s a grown man, and he needs to make this decision.”

In the end, these are some of the facts:

• She has a sister-in-law.

• She went to her home last weekend.

• The sister-in-law made spaghetti.

• Everything else was a story. A painful, stressful story.

This person’s sister-in-law made spaghetti, which she interpreted as conniving and

an attempt to sabotage her weight loss. Could the spaghetti perhaps have meant something else to her sister-in-law? Were there any other ways to interpret the facts that might feel better to her?

She could acknowledge that maybe her sister-in-law made spaghetti because her brother loves spaghetti, she’s Italian, and it’s one of her specialties. So either her original story or the latter one could be true. Which story served her better? Which story served the relationship better? 

Even more, she can consider how it felt to leave the facts alone and not insert a meaning or a story about those facts. “My sister-in-law made spaghetti.” Without a story, this fact doesn’t hurt.

Facts never do hurt. Whenever we realize we’re creating a painful story, we can separate out the facts. Then we get to create our pain or our peace (or happiness) by how we choose to interpret the facts.

Your Turn: What stories have you been making up about situations, people, things, events? How do these stories leave you feeling? What are the facts? How do the facts leave you feeling? What happens if you tell the story of how this is happening FOR you instead of TO you?

I talk more about this topic of facts vs. stories in my most recent podcast episode for Get Out of Your Own Way. Listen to Episode 10: “Your Stories Are Getting in Your Way” here: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Ruminate much?

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

It’s a thought error.

I learned the term “thought error” from my teacher at The Life Coach School. Thought errors are also known as cognitive distortions, which are automatic, often unrealistic ways of thinking that can rapidly affect our mood and create or keep us stuck in cycles of anxiety, sadness, or other difficult emotions. Thought errors and cognitive distortions include all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, jumping to conclusions, and personalizing, among others. 

A thought loop is when we keep repeating the thought error over and over again. It’s also known as ruminating (which is related to a cow chewing its cud, chewing on something over and over again). And we know our thoughts create our feelings, so whatever thought is looping, the feeling will likely persist and get stronger as well. 

Usually it’s the feeling of fear—or some form of it (worry, anxiety)— that drives us to loop our thoughts. And it makes sense because our brains have evolved to keep us alive and safe, so it’s usually looking for threats in the world. Most of the time, the threats are created in our minds.

I was very familiar with thought errors and thought loops. I ruminated and made up stories about facts. It’s easy to make up stories about facts:

We’re used to telling ourselves stories about facts. We make facts mean something about us, usually that we’re not good enough or we’ll never have what we want. 

A helpful way to remind us that we are thinking thoughts and that they are OPTIONAL is to add these phrases to our thoughts:

“I’m just thinking the thought _____.”

“I notice I keep thinking the thought _____.”

“I’m telling myself the story that _____.”

“Right now I’m thinking the thought ______, and that’s okay.”

Then we can find some space between our thoughts and what we think is fact. Sometimes this can create some peace or ease for us. We can discover that we are NOT our thoughts. We can start to become aware of our thoughts and then start CHOOSING THEM on purpose to serve us.

Your turn: The next time you find yourself ruminating or looping thoughts, remind yourself that you’re thinking thoughts and possibly making up stories about facts. What are the facts? What is the story you’re telling yourself about the facts? When you remind yourself of the story vs. the facts, how do you feel differently?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.