The power of stories

When I was a lot younger I got my heart broken by someone and for ages I felt really humilated, not just by the fact that I got dumped but also how I perceived how I acted towards the end of that relationship. I felt so embarrassed by how desperate I must have seemed and what a fool he must have thought I was. Part of me is still a little embarrassed (shame has real longevity).

When enough time had gone by I felt that actually I really hadn't been so foolish, it really hadn't been that bad. And years later I saw my ex and we had a conversation and it confirmed I had overblown things in my mind. A lot. 

Of course, perception counts for so much. For my doula training I had to write my birth story and my experience of the immediate postnatal period. I wrote them twice, about a month apart, because each time I felt different about what had happened. I'd written my birth story down perhaps three times before and each of those times it was different.

It's possible to do this for any event in our lives, of course, and it's more useful and therapeutic if the event brings up some big emotion in us. Stories over time, told to ourselves or others and received skilfully in the latter case, can heal us. Maybe not all by themselves, but with other support and other actions. What is fascinating about stories is their plasticity. There are the immutable facts of location, timings, characters and so on and then there is everything else that is personal to us - how we felt about, perceived all the things that happened to us or that we did ourselves. 

And that always changes, sometimes in big or small ways. For ages I'd felt shock and disappointment about my birth. And then, literally in a moment, the story seemed to change. The same stuff happened, I know I felt a certain way during it all and I have in no way sugar coated it - but I was finally able to be kind to myself about it all. I didn't fail! This had been the big story for me. I failed on a certain level to "nail it". I f**ked it up. But not any more. Of course I didn't. 

We're not our stories. They shape us but we can shape them right back.