How rewriting our stories can lead to emotional wellness

Whose perspectives are fueling our reactions to our circumstances?

In my last blog post, I spoke about feeling our feelings by disconnecting them from the story of our circumstances. This is an excellent start to reaching emotional freedom because letting our feelings flow unhindered means we do not build up a mountain of resistance. However, this is only one of the steps; because we have a story about what happened, and every time we think of that story, our feelings revisit us. Allowing our feelings to flow is the first step to emotional freedom. We must practice our ability to feel, acknowledge, and allow our feelings every time our mind focuses on the story.

The next step is to deactivate our emotional triggers; these triggers are how the story we carry causes us pain. When we are emotionally triggered by an event, the energy behind our reactions is often enlarged by the mountain of resistance to feelings that were unprocessed from our childhood or even adult years.

We see the world…

The Talmud has a very wise saying, “We see the world as we are, not as it is.” We can demonstrate that this is true; if you ask ten people to recount an event, you will get ten different perspectives on what happened. We look at the world through filters handed to us by authorities in our young lives. Some of the filters hurt us, and some bring us good.

We carry these filters given to us by others that skew our perspectives. This is how we create our story around our circumstances. These filters have been handed to us by authorities in our life, our parents, teachers, and religious leaders. Yet these filters reveal how the authority saw life, not how we saw it. When we are in a subordinate position, such as being a child, we will often take the filter as if it is truth. Our filters create our story of what happened, but we can change our story when we let go of our filters.

The technique to rewrite your stories

When I was four, my drunken, enraged father screamed at me that I wasn’t worth the dirt under his feet. As a four-year-old, I believed he spoke the truth. Yet as an adult, I can revisit that circumstance; I can picture it in my mind and witness the interaction. Through this view, I know that what he said revealed much about who he was at that moment. In truth, hiw words didn’t say anything about the innocent child version of me. In my imagination, I pick up the child me and tell her the truth about the situation. With this understanding, I can now let go of that filter; it no longer has power over me. Further, I can open my heart to compassion for my father. Because only an emotionally injured person would behave that way with an innocent child.

You get to choose…

It is possible that your reactions to an event may be based on the information given to you as a child; information that you, as an adult, can accept was untruthful about you. Further, you can understand that the information was very revealing about the person saying it. Taking this higher view of the circumstances of your youth allows you to release some of your emotional triggers. In my next post, I will speak about the final step needed in my emotional freedom technique to release emotional triggers.

Are you tired of using tired old emotional coping skills that may not really support you? Are you looking for new ways to deal with emotions? Download my free Emotional Management Toolbox today!