Rewrite your Story

Some life events are so overwhelming that we simply get lost in a sea of emotions. A person who is fired from her job after years of positive performance reviews may feel angry, resentful and betrayed by her former supervisor. She may believe she was targeted by colleagues who were threatened by her abilities or begin to doubt her own professional skills.

A parent who doesn’t take her child to the doctor when he had a fever may tell herself she is neglectful or unloving when she learns that her child has pneumonia. She may beat herself up with hostile self-statements day after day as a result. Or she may push the event to the back of her consciousness, so she doesn’t have to think about what her behavior means. The situation simply feels too painful to confront.

The stories we tell ourselves about our experiences are often more damaging than the events themselves. The fired employee might find a new job, but let nagging resentments and self-doubt keep her from doing her very best work. The mom I described may pull away from her children because she feels like a failure or become overprotective in an attempt to prevent future mistakes.

Often, previous events continue to haunt us because we can’t understand why they happened. We move forward before we create a coherent explanation because we want to stop feeling so bad. But doing so can be costly.

Studies show people who can’t explain why something happened are likely to continue to think about the event over and over, repeatedly reliving their intense emotional reactions to it. Psychologists call this rumination. It’s related to increased anxiety and depression, and to a number of physical symptoms, like sleeplessness and stress hormone levels.

The good news is this: You can revisit and revise the stories you tell yourself about past events so that they make sense and stop nagging you. In Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, author Timothy Wilson describes a writing technique created by coping expert James Pennebaker, that can give you a new perspective on old problems. He calls this technique story editing.

Here’s how to do it.

For three or four days, write about the event for 15 minutes, describing in detail the reasons for your feelings. It may help to “Go back to the time and place of your experience…and see the scene in your mind’s eye. Now take a few steps back. Move away from the situation to the point where you can now watch the event unfold from a distance,” Wilson writes. Take the perspective of a neutral observer.

Then ask “Why did I have those feelings?” Focus on explanation, not on reliving the experience. Write out as many reasons you can to explain how you felt at the time.

Start fresh each day, instead of adding to your previous story, so you think through the situation from a new place psychologically.

In 3 or 4 days, you’ll likely arrive at a much more complete and coherent explanation for the situation than you had before. And making sense of experiences helps us move past them.

My question to you: What troublesome tales are you telling yourself? Rewrite them now.