Episode 47 How to Re-frame Your Difficult Stories: Step 2 (Workshop 5-Part Series)

How to Reframe Your Difficult Stories 5-Part Workshop Series: Step 2 – Tell Your Stories Those stories hidden in the dark of night, kept under cover, the lid closely guarded and locked, cannot breathe or break free from shame, guilt or sadness that are a part of their very nature. Until the lid is opened, until the light can shine down upon the dark shadows, to chase them out and loosen the ties that hold the story closed, there will be no healing. Join us today for Step 2 of the 5 part reframing process. Tell Your Stories! Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it. So, here we are in week two of our five-week series. I hope your work with the acceptance of your stories has been productive this past week. Moving onto step two this week, we come to the point of TELLING OUR STORY.  It’s time to say it out loud. To put it into words. Before some of you start hyperventilating with the idea of this type of exposure and vulnerability, this does not mean you should run out and post your most shame filled or difficult stories on Facebook, or announcing them in the city square. It means coming to a point of claiming them, where you can put into words your stories, in a safe space. A space where you are able to put words to even your deeply disturbing stories that have remained silent, in one way or another. Becky Andrews, a therapist at Resilience Inc, a guest we’ve had speak on the podcast, episode 022, explained to me, telling our stories is invaluable, we must talk and share our stories, she said. We know that studies indicate that talk therapy – thus sharing our stories, actually lessen the intensity and stress in our brain. So, I asked a woman who had done the Next Level emotional intelligence leadership workshop about her experiences in telling her stories. Jamie said, “There was one experience in particular where I had already had my turn to speak, but I had a very clear realization while listening to the rest of my group take their turn.  I knew without a doubt that I needed to say it out loud to my group.  I was able to share and while sharing, the pain and heartache that had started with one experience so many years ago, left me.  It was so freeing.  I obviously still have the memory, but it does not have the same effect or hold over me that it used to.  The other thing about this experience that was interesting was that there were so many other experiences in my life where other people treated me in a similar way as the person did in this initial experience. These experiences just piled up on each other over the years leaving me feeling unimportant and unloved.  By sharing this initial experience, the pain from these other events in my life left as well.  It was amazing! It was huge for me.” She went on, “Another experience was an exercise where you were forced to just keep talking while you really got to the bottom of things.  This gave me the opportunity to finally say out loud how I feel about my mothering.  It has been tough dealing with my son’s Aspergers, ADHD, and mood disorder.  I experienced shame and heartache over how I had handled different situations in weakness, and heartache over the situation as a whole.  Saying it out loud to a male that was there representing my son was cleansing. Saying it out loud is a necessary step to healing and moving on,” she finished. Often times the thing we will gain from telling our story, from putting it into words, is not something we will fully understand until it is done. Perhaps it is like Jamie,