Episode 48 How to Re-frame Your Difficult Stories: Step 3 (Workshop 5-part Series)

How to Reframe Your Difficult Stories: 5 Part Workshop Series: Step 3– Finding the Meaning or Purpose Behind an Experience When Becky Andrews  (episode 22) found out that she had a degenerative eye disease that would cause her to go blind, I’m sure she wondered, “Why me?.” When my son was diagnosed with Leukemia and had to return from his mission where he was teaching others about Christ’s love for them and serving them, a journey he had worked, waited, and saved money for, I wondered, “Why him? When Rusty Lindquist (episode 21) was living with his mother in a trailer, in the woods, with no electricity or running water as a child because she had to hide him from a father who was trying to sacrifice Rusty, like Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac, in order to prove to God that he was to be the next prophet;  then one day his mother didn’t come back from work and he sat there all alone, day after day wondering what happened to her…these are not the moments when we see the meaning. These are the moments when the tornado hits and the pain rises and the rubber meets the road. But later there is a space where we must find the purpose, the meaning behind the experience in order to make peace with our path. Pain without purpose is just pain. Join us today for an in depth look at the third step of reframing our stories – Finding the meaning and purpose behind an experience. 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. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it. A crucial step in being able to find peace in our most painful stories is the step of finding some purpose for them, some meaning, something that we can take away from the darkness, sacrifice, or pain that paved the path we walked. The Buddha taught that all life is suffering, that suffering comes from holding on to selfish desires, and that selfish desires can be overcome. The Christian dogma indicates that God uses our suffering to refine and teach us. If you Google suffering you will find that almost all results lead you to some religious reference, which to me indicates that when it comes to our suffering we turn outside ourselves to find answers. We want help. We want to find a peace in the storm, which is often what we turn to religion for.  This is not uncommon, in fact, it’s completely common, hence the Google search results. When we go through the chapters of our stories where we battle the dragons, the antagonists, the sorrows and disappointments we desperately want to believe that there can be something good to come from it. We hope against hope looking for answers and asking the questions…why? Joan Borysenko said, “We cannot wish old feelings away nor do spiritual exercises for overcoming them until we have woven a healing story that transforms our previous life’s experience and gives meaning to whatever pain we have endured.” Philip Zimbardo, one of the most respected psychologists of the twentieth century, and past president of the American Psychological Association taught at Yale and Stanford and authored over 50 books. He was born in 1934. When he was 5 years old he got whopping cough and pneumonia. Steve Kotler, in his book The Rise of Superman, retells Zimbardo’s story pointing out that “In those days before antibiotics 63 percent of all children with whooping cough or double pneumonia did not recover. A friend Zimbardo made, as a little boy in the hospital, died there, next to him, and Zimbardo found that the only way to fight off the depression and fear of the situation was to use his imagination – he just kept imagining better possible...