This is Your Life: Sticking Points and Stories

Often, a significant life event is retold so often, and to so many, that it becomes “the story”, but our lives are made up of many stories and to let one become king is to rob the others of their merit.

I’ll try and explain. Sometimes your life may seem coloured by one particular experience; often it is an unwelcome experience, a traumatic one that, due to your desire to comprehend it and process it, gets expressed over and over again. But this externalising doesn’t actually distance you from the drama, and the emotional turmoil that this story evokes.

To retell it is to feed it and to sustain it in your present, even though it happened in your past. But, in truth, this story is just an episode. It might be a particularly gripping one, intense, or disturbing, but it’s still an episode, and to allow it dominance over the other episodes in your life is an injustice to yourself.

Imagine if J.K. Rowling wrote only of the time Harry Potter was caught up in the experience with the dementors on the train to Hogwarts, and Harry himself was so caught up in it, confused and scared, that he told his tale whenever he got the chance. If his disturbance over the event really got to him, he might not go on to experience his many other adventures, challenges and triumphs.

Harry’s story would have ended prematurely, he would have lived on, of course, but it would have been a life as a narrator, retelling that one event, rather than a life as a participant, going on to experience other events.

EFT - Emotional Freedom Techniques - is a powerful asset in transforming your past tales of woe into an episode in your history, no larger, or louder than any other. Just something that happened, something from which you can preserve what you learnt, but let any emotional distress go and move on.

Useful don’t you think? You can learn how to take the sting out of your stories in my EFT eBook