“What do we get to keep from
something that already happened?”
Most of you have “heard” my
stories about being bullied, being overweight, struggling with social anxiety
and depression, etc. As you can imagine,
I spend a lot of time pondering just why I am still depressed…why I still let
the past own my future. I tend to filter all things that happen to me through
the eyes of that 8th grade girl who had a tack put in her seat by a
few classmates who thought it would be funny to see the fat girl jump and
scream. In other words, every bad (or
even mediocre) thing that happens, I tend to think, “Well, that’s just my
life. It’s how things go for me.”
Of late, however, I’ve been
trying to “reframe” how I look at things. I’m not that shy, fat, scared little girl any
more. These days, I’ve got all the
things in the world going for me: I’m a 45 year old woman; I have a great kid and I’m pretty proud of
her; I have a husband who loves me; I’ve got a job that I love (most days); and I’ve got the best set of friends anybody
could possibly ask for. So, why can’t I
look at life TODAY with the eyes of that grown woman, instead of the sad eyes
of that little girl?
I’ll tell you why: because we all filter our everyday occurrences
through our past experiences. It makes
perfect sense—it’s classic behavior mod.
We learn positive behaviors from our past (either from positive
reinforcement or punishment). We train
ourselves to behave certain ways based upon how others react to us and that’s
mostly good, I think. In some cases,
however, past experiences become an albatross
around our necks and we end up reacting to current life events in
negative ways, not because they are horrible events but because of how our PAST
has shaped us. I “learned” early on that
as a fat, poor, shy kid that I was not as “good” as the other kids. These days, I still find myself feeling that
way in many situations. It’s an old
script and I’ve kept it way too long.
A good friend sent this video to
me several days ago and I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Of course, my knee-jerk reaction to it is to
roll my eyes. I can rewrite the past by
reframing it? Seriously? <massive eye roll> But I listened closely, not with my rational ears,
but with my spiritual ears. Can we
change our past experiences simply by CHOOSING the story we tell? Can reframing or recontextualizing the thoughts
and events of the past actually change the physiological reactions we
have? It makes sense, in a hippy dippy,
drug-trippy sort of way. I know that if
I think back to particularly embarrassing experiences from my past that I can,
quite literally, feel that blushy feeling, that drop of the stomach. It is a real, physiological reaction. Those things are in the past—there is no
current stimulus for a blush and a sick feeling in the stomach, for current
embarrassment in response to an old event.
But I can still call up that response.
I kept those memories and they shaped me and became real and they remain
real today, years later. What if we
could learn to reshape those memories and shift them and view them in a more
positive light?
It’s a pretty fantastical
idea. I’m not sure that I buy into
it. I do think that we can definitely
reframe the way we perceive current events by looking at them through positive eyes
rather than negative. Saturday night was
a very stressful night for me. I felt,
for the first time in many years, like that awkward, shy, unpopular girl who
sat alone at lunch and at recess so many times.
I wasn’t physically alone. I had
a couple of really good friends on either side of me, keeping me grounded. But in my mind, I was alone and afraid. I clearly felt the feelings that I felt so
long ago. Every time I would slip into
that “old script” I would redirect my thoughts—I’m not that girl. I’m a grown woman with so many positives and
I don’t need to live my life through that old, cloudy lens. I’m happy to say that I made it through the
night and feel much stronger and more empowered not in spite of those
challenges but BECAUSE of them.
It’s food for thought. Watch the video with an open mind. See what you think. Jason Silva says, "You can choose the story you tell, my friends. You can choose the story you tell." I think maybe he's on to something.
