Rewriting Our Stories

For a long time, I've worked with coaching clients to "rewrite their stories."  This language is certainly not unique to me and my coaching clients or even my own personal work.  The idea is that whatever we've told ourselves about what is possible is a made-up story, so we can make up a different one...and then step into the one we prefer.

I didn't start dancing until I had literally hardly survived a personal health crisis.  If I lived, there was a high likelihood that I would be a quadriplegic.  I had always wanted to dance, but initially my mother didn't want me to dance and later circumstances always seemed to intervene. (Excuses.) When faced with the possibility that I might never walk again, I knew that the one thing I really wished I had done was dance.

By the grace of God and the hands of a remarkable surgeon, I am both alive and mobile, a fact that goes in my gratitude journal every day.  As soon as I was finished with rehab, I went out and signed up for dance lessons.  The rest is history.  Thankfully, last night I danced almost every dance for three hours straight.  Nothing makes me feel more alive or brings me more joy.

But, when I was learning something many learn in childhood or early adulthood, shall we say at a much later stage in life, I struggled.  It felt to me like I took the same dance lesson over and over again.  I was clumsy and certainly not the vision of grace that I dreamed of being.  One day I heard that our brain needs to hear something 10,000 times before it believes it.  Well, I thought, if that is my only problem, I will just start saying, "I am a dancer," until I've said it 10,000 times.  Doing so became the soundtrack of my life.  While I was driving in the car, while I was running, while I was swimming, and while I was bathing: "I am a dancer."

I said it different ways:

• I am a dancer
• I am a dancer
• I am a dancer

Then I added pizzazz, spinning about with my arms wide to the heavens: I am a dancer.  One day it finally happened: in a split-second in the middle of a lesson I'd repeated over and again, the figure happened easily.  Then I couldn't imagine how I hadn't been able to do it. By force of will, I had convinced my brain that I was a dancer, and now, humbly speaking, I am a pretty darned good one. I don't know if I said it exactly 10,000 times, but it must have been close. (I am sure that I hadn't put in the 10,000 hours that some people say is necessary for mastery.)

Today I was listening to a podcast interview with Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., the founder and medical director at the Trauma Center of Boston and a professor of psychiatry at Boston University medical School.  He first worked with Holocaust survivors. More recently, he has worked with Iraqi and Afghan veterans and 9/11 and Boston Marathon survivors.  He described one of the essentials in transforming a person's trauma experience is the ability to visualize a different ending.  That prevents the individual from fearing a repeat experience.

He shared a story of a five-year-old who attended the childcare center at the Twin Towers and actually saw the planes fly into the skyscrapers.  When van der Kolk had the boy draw a picture, as you might expect, it included the tall buildings with planes flying into them, and it also included a trampoline in the foreground. When van der Kolk asked about the trampoline, the boy said that was so people jumping from the towers would bounce with they landed.  That boy experienced few traumatic after-effects that those who hadn't found an alternative resolution for the crisis did.

As I listened, I realized that what he had done was the same thing that I had done, as well as what my clients had done: the boy had rewritten the story.  The scenario changed from people dive to their deaths to something vaguely resembling a game that most kids would enjoy: jump on the trampoline and dismount so the next person can use it.

Yesterday's blogpost about being hypercritical was fresh in my brain as I listened to this interview. What occurred to me was that in my shift from viewing spiritual lessons as drudgery to slog through, I had rewritten my story, visualizing a different ending this time. The slogging is now a passage way to something I want in my future. It seems to me that what works in goal setting for coaching clients and survival tactics for trauma survivors is also a good tactic for making our way successfully through our spiritual work. Visualizing what it will be like on the other side of the lesson and writing that ending for our story seems to be the key.