The story we tell ourselves

The story on repeat

Like a stuck record on an old turntable, the same tired tune. The same plot, the same lines, the same feelings, the same actions or the same paralysis, day after day. You tell it to other people and they hand it back to you, and the telling reinforces the very thing you are desperate to get out of.

Your body aches with it. Your thinking goes foggy. Your emotions spiral. So you find something to do instead: eating, drinking, smoking, scrolling, another episode, anything rather than sitting with the story. I understand it more than I would like to. I have been there, and on some days I am still there.

That story is not you

The story bleeds you dry. It takes energy, vitality and joy, and it quietly decides what is possible and what is not, who you are and who you will never be. It is the warden of a prison with no walls, and after long enough it stops feeling like a story at all. It feels like reality, and you are no longer the main character of your life but someone watching it happen.

But it was written by other people. Family, circumstance, what you were rewarded for and punished for, years of programming absorbed before you could evaluate any of it. We learn to fit in, to please, to say the acceptable thing, and we bury the self underneath layers of a narrative we never chose. Then we mistake the burial for who we are.

You cannot change the circumstances of your past. You can change the meaning you give them, and the meaning is what runs your life.

The turning point

Perhaps you are at the point where the weight of the old story has become unbearable and you are genuinely ready. Perhaps you have been here before: you made the plan, gathered the willpower, told the people, promised yourself this time was different, and within days you were back in the same pit wondering what is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. Willpower argues with the conscious mind, and the story is not kept there. It is held somewhere older and more stubborn, and that is precisely where this work goes.

The view from higher up

Start by stepping back. Imagine yourself as an eagle, high above your own life, watching the events rather than living inside them. From there, three questions:

• ·What have these experiences actually taught me?

• ·What meaning could I give the hardest of them, other than the one I have been giving?

• ·How would I tell this story if I were on my own side?

This is not about erasing anything. It is about reshaping: struggles becoming stepping stones, failures becoming information. And if the thought arrives that your past is too messy and your hand was dealt too badly, notice that this too is a line from the old script.

Writing the new one

Begin gently. Some of the choices were made for you, by people and forces you had no say over. Forgive yourself for what was, and put your attention on what could be.

There is another story in you, one of strength and growth and possibility, and it has been waiting a long time for space to breathe. It deserves to be told, heard and understood.

This is your moment, my friend. Change your story.

The first consultation is ninety minutes and mostly conversation. Bring the story. We will look at it together, and nothing is decided before then.

Angela Pereira is a certified hypnotherapist and Parts Therapy facilitator in Mulbarton, Johannesburg South, working in person and online. She came to this work through her own hypnotherapy, for a driving phobia that had quietly organised her life.