Stories lived & stories told: living our story in our bodies

I mentioned in my blog Don’t Marry Your Hypothesis on the 5th of April that narrative therapy spoke to some deep knowing that I had always felt but found hard to express.

I loved the keys it offered me in understanding the ways that we begin to inhabit the stories we tell ourselves & the ways that we can begin to externalise the problems that living our story can bring, learning to see these problems as characters in our story & getting to know what they wants for us; what they like & dislikes & the ways they speak to us & the trick they can play to keep us hooked to our story.

As we delve more deeply & begin to unpick our stories we can begin to hold our narrative & the characters within it differently.  eg Imposter Syndrome, so often one of the allies of anxiety. We might want to name her The Imposter Monster because she comes across as so mean & cruel. But looking more deeply & thinking about when this story around being an imposter first appeared we may find that actually this ally appeared in the context of for example bullying & she is in fact more of a scared little child trying to keep us safe. We may find that the harsh words she uses have traces of words used to wound us – words that ridiculed us in a moment.

Recognising this mean sounding ally for who she really is can open up new layers to our narrative. Rather than being mean & spiteful this wounded part of us just wants to protect is & is saying ‘Never ever put yourself in that kind of danger again; never allow yourself to be shamed & humiliated, never get above yourself ‘ Her story is that if we stay small, we stay safe & this can be a hidden narrative that we may find woven through our lives, stopping us reaching our full potential & keeping us  so cowed that I we need to deny, dismiss or downplay the strengths & achievements others see.

But remember our stories don’t just wound us; they also have lots of ways of alluring us to keeping us hooked in.

‘Stay small stay safe’ has benefits that can be attractive.

If we stay small stay safe, we can play in the shallow end, having fun with stuff we enjoy without even taking risks. For me personally my stay small stay safe imposter offered me endless space to bury myself in learning, one of my my greatest pleasures & allowed me to indulge myself in oodles of thinking reflecting & ruminating, some of my greatest diversions. I always felt comforted that I was learning & growing & being productive, but I also felt protected in the safe haven of never taking risks.

So instead we get to hang out with other characters who help us feel safe – Perfectionism who keeps us endlessly working over our ideas, focused on finding just the right word, phrase or paragraph that will express exactly what we mean so there can be no confusion no doubt, no challenge & we can be ready finally to feel safe enough to jump in at the deep end, safe in the knowledge that all will be well.

But there is nothing in life that is risk proof.

& when we don’t take risks, we don’t ever have to face our fears. We may take tentative steps, testing ourselves just a little bit, chatting with friends & family – people to care & who know & respect our ideas - but we never have to face the opinions or scrutiny of those who don’t know us - the fear of being drawn back into the arena of shame & humiliation where our story first began is just too strong .

& stay small stay safe can have some nasty physical side effects.

The very thought of sharing our ideas with people we don’t know can made us ill & not just to feel ill, actually make us ill.

For me this fear of challenging the narrative of stay small stay safe led me to develop aches & pains that would go on for weeks & even months, I would suffer headaches & nausea that would have me in bed for days & I even began to develop psoriasis that made me feel awful. This reached a crescendo when I developed a bout of psoriasis during an attempt to do a video I wanted to post online. Needless to say; that did not happen.

When we feel cramped by the confines of our story stress & chronic stress can be the outcome.

When we think of stress we tend to think of the psychological & emotional components – the fussing & flapping & feeling overwhelmed but stress has very physical symptoms – the acute symptoms of our pounding heart & dry mouth, the sweats that may pass over us & our butterflies in our churning belly that may even lead to an upset tummy but also chronic symptoms – aches & pains that don’t seem to have any clear or consistent structural basis; recurrent skin rashes & issues that flare under duress & can lead to compromises to our immune system that can leave us feeling vulnerable & weak.

& these symptoms of chronic stress can persist long after we have left the stressful situation. Just like the cold that comes on when we take a holiday from work, chronic stress symptoms can erupt & persist even when we are in a calm environment with no apparent immediate or impending stress.

We feel like we are & should be calm, but our body is saying otherwise.

Trying to make sense of this helped me integrate & understand another piece of inner knowing that I’d always struggled to have the right words to articulate. While I’d been working within the frameworks of systemic family therapy, I read Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score & this inspirational book offered me a vocabulary to understand what’s happening when chronic stress takes hold.

I’d always felt that my body held scores – for years difficult situations would leave me with a legacy of days of hip & back pain & I’d say it was because I’d braced for impact; I’d felt martyred by years of menstrual cramps that seemed to have to structural biological cause & I had recurrent bouts of spots that weren’t acne & didn’t respond to spot treatments. Most dramatically I’d suffered a fainting fit in 2013 that had led to a diagnosis of chronic stress.

Van der Kolk explores the way that trauma has emotional & psychological impacts but it also affects us neurologically & physiologically, actually rewiring our brain & placing us in a state of constant state of stress & even numbness that can lead to many physical problems & health issues.

As I’ve developed my career in holistic therapies, I’ve revisited this book to reflect on our bodies & their physiological responses. For myself I noticed that the more I was learning about a career that I felt so passionately about the more my body was manifesting symptoms that said ‘No no no’ to taking powerful steps.

My own body was trying to keep locked into that narrative of ‘stay small, stay safe’ with symptoms that were actively blocking me from taking action.

Now emotional & spiritual bypassing would have had me ignore these symptoms & force myself to crunch through after all it’d been by habit for years. Not slept well, you got to get up & go to work, you can’t let people down; back aching, get up get going you can’t let people down. This is the kind of thing I’d been trying when I developed that bout of psoriasis mid-video. I knew I’d been invalidating my feelings for years & the whole point of the learning I was doing was to challenge this & help others do the same & so it would have been out & out self-sabotage & hypocrisy to have crushed down my own feelings & symptoms to force myself to deliver content.

There was no option but to follow my instinct, step back & try to make sense of the ways that our stories are woven within us on a physical energetic emotional wisdom & spiritual level.

This led to a period of amazing research & developing a wonderful friendship with Sam from SJ Therapies as well as attending many Super Conferences run by Alex Howard & Conscious Life as well as training in Reiki, EFT, EMDR & Reflexology. It also led to me occasionally continuing to develop bouts of physical health issues because I was so passionate & interested & devouring learning that I didn’t know how to stop – how to regulate – the very thing I was trying to learn.

Gradually began to make sense of the ways our stories of ourselves get held within us mind, body & soul. Our mind & body are in fact engaged in a constant & multi-layered dialogue as we interact with & experience our environment; a conversation that is mapped through the vast network of our nervous system.

Now I always balked at science at school, but this is fascinating stuff.

Our nervous system is made up of two parts. Our Central Nervous System - our brain & spinal cord & our Peripheral Nervous System - a networks of nerves that branch out from our Central Nervous system & extend to our organs, muscles & glands, facilitating the constant communication between our brain, our body & our environment. From our somatic nervous system that allows us to process all the sensory information we take in from sight, hearing, touch, smell & taste & controls our voluntary movement to our autonomic nervous system that’s responsible for all our involuntary unconscious processes – breathing, heart rate & digestion our nervous system is key to all the ways that we experience our world.

& its our autonomic nervous system that gets affected & can be glitched by our stories.

Our autonomic nervous system is further subdivided into our Sympathetic & Parasympathetic nervous systems.

Our Sympathetic nervous system is the one that gets activated when we are physically active & it’s particularly known for being the site of our fight & flight response when it increases our blood flow & heart rate & slows down bodily processes like digestion & reproduction, all stuff that’s just not needed in the context of an emergency.

Our Parasympathetic nervous system is the one that relaxes us, helping us recuperate after exertion or regroup after an emergency has passed. It’s the system that supports the smooth maintenance of normal bodily functions – regulating our blood flow & our heart rate, allowing us to rest, & ensuring our digestive & reproductive capacities are restored. We may think that would be best to stay in that parasympathetic relaxed state, but actually when we are healthy & in tune with our environment these two systems are in constant interplay, regulating our responses to our environment.

When we have an uncomfortable & unsettling story about ourselves & our capacity to cope it tends to upset this rhythmic interplay between our sympathetic & parasympathetic nervous system, keeping up hyped up in sympathetic arousal. Every time we tell ourselves we can’t cope; we’re gonna mess up; everyone hates us; they see through us – whatever the narrative behind that story we are living, we have a range of emotions & feelings that make our heart pound & our blood course; that churn our belly & keep us in brace position – ready for impending doom.

Now we tend to use the terms emotions & feelings interchangeably but there is a fundamental difference between these two. Our emotions are physiological responses to our moment-to-moment lived experience of our world. They are intense, unconscious & transient – they surges & waves of chemicals & hormones released within our body in response to stimuli from our environment & we can’t control then because they belong in our automatic nervous system. Feelings on the other hand are more conscious & stable. They come up in the context of the stories we tell ourselves & they are full of the meanings we give our experiencing of emotions inside us & as such they are so much more malleable & open to interpretation. We can’t change our emotional response – it just happens - but we can change our feelings towards this response.

Emotions & feelings are then like 2 sides of a coin -separate but intimately linked with feelings acting like a bridge between our raw emotions & our understanding of our emotions. Experiencing both emotions & feelings are part of the healthy functioning of our body & both are invaluable in helping us to focus & get motivated us to take action – they are our internal radar that helps us to adapt & survive according to what we are perceiving around us & inside us.

Our emotions rouse from the limbic system of our brain, the part that’s got our amygdala – our danger alarm that flags up emergencies - to course through our nervous system creating spikes & surges that activate our sympathetic nervous system telling us to get ready for action. Our feelings – the ones that tell us stories about this emotional response - can keep us in a place where we get flooded with spikes & surges of emotions that inhibit the smooth shifting from our sympathetic to our parasympathetic nervous systems.

When we get caught up in our feelings & we begin to live the story that we have absorbed & repeated about ourselves we find ourselves repeatedly caught up in tidal waves of emotional surges that can overwhelm us physically as well as emotionally. This is how our stories - the raw emotions & the feelings we hold about them - can become embedded within us & can get lodged in particular areas of our bodies. The more we repeat our stories of ourselves the more they begin to form feedback loops – this thought leads to that behaviour & that behaviour reinforces this thought & so we go on.

In our thinking this can be the ways that we get into the realm of catastrophising & fortune telling – expecting & predicting that it’ll all go horribly wrong & then focusing on the losses, mistakes & negative outcomes to demonstrate to ourselves that we were right.

In terms of our bodies this can be the ways that our stories begin to cause us to hold our bodies in particular ways – we way find that we are caught up in patterns of shallow breathing or we may even catch ourselves holding our breath or we may notice that we always seem to be tensing our bodies braced against the emotional & even physical impact of our stories.

We may start out reacting to circumstances but if they happen often enough, we begin anticipating those circumstances, even misreading what’s happening because we expect something to happen.  Over time our patterns begin to take their toll both physically & emotionally & soon the physical is informing the emotional & the emotional the physical & we are living our story in our mind & our body.

& then it begins to affect us on an energetic level, lodging deep within our mindset to feel like part of us. When we are constantly caught up in the emotions & feelings of our stories & struggling with the physical impacts of living in our story, it is very hard to make sense of what is happening - to reach that mythical point where we can learn the lessons & move forwards.

We are so caught up in the feels – physical as well as emotional - that we are stuck in patterns of constantly reacting & responding with no space to reflect & the more we react & respond the more we become lodged in our feedback loop unable to see the wood for the trees.

& the more we’re focused on the trees when we know there must be a wood out there somewhere the more we begin to tell ourselves that it must be us – fleshing out our stories with all the mean words & the wounded allies that keep it going. Other people seem to make a mistake, learn the lesson & move on but not us, we walk down that road over & over, dropping into the same damn hole so it must be us – we are what ever our story is.

This is how we end up repeating the same patterns & behaviours, confirming our story to ourselves over & over without being able to step out & break the cycle.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. When we understand our story - when we get a sense of how it started & the blocks that its creating – the ways it’s showing up within us emotionally & physically & when we are able to externalise its impact – noticing what our story wants for us - it’s likes & dislikes; the ways it speaks to us & the tricks it plays to keep us hooked – we can begin to shift our narrative on an emotional, physical & energetic level & next week I’ll look at the ways that holistic therapies to break the power of the feedback loop in the stories that may be holding us back.

Warm wordy hugs

Laura xx