Tag: interpretation

The Magic of Rewriting Our Most Painful Stories

“When you bring peace to your past, you can move forward to your future.” ~Unknown

It amazes me how things that happen in our childhood can greatly impact our adult lives. I learned the hard way that I was living my life with a deep wound in my heart.

My father was a very strict man with a temper when I was little, starting when I was around seven years old.

He had a way of making me feel like all my efforts were not enough. If I scored an 8 in a math exam, he would say, “Why 8 and not 10?” and then punish me. It was a time when some parents thought that beating their children was a way to “put them in place” and teach them a lesson. All this taught me, though, was that I was a disappointment.

His favorite phrase was “You will never be better than me.”

As I got older, his temper cooled down a bit, but one thing didn’t change: his painful remarks. “At your age, I was already married, had a house, a car, two daughters, and a piece of land… what have YOU accomplished? See? You will never surpass me.”

It was his way of “inspiring me” to do better with my life, but it had the opposite effect on me. It was slowly killing my self-esteem.

When my father passed away, I was seven-year-old Cerise all over again. At the funeral, I asked him, “Daddy, did I finally make you proud? Did I do good with my life?”

This was the trigger that made me rethink what I was doing with my life. I had to stop for a moment to look at the past. This can be very difficult to do, but sometimes we need to face those painful events in order to understand the nature of our poor decisions and behavior.

It helped me realize that, unconsciously, I was looking for my father’s approval in the guys I dated. And you know what? It got me nothing but disappointment and heartache, because I was looking for something that they couldn’t give me.

Inside, I was still that little girl looking for her father’s love.

When you are a child, you are considered a victim, but when you are a grown up, it is your duty to heal from what was done to you. You just can’t go through life feeling sorry for yourself and complaining about the hand you were dealt. This just keeps you stuck in a sad, joyless life and jeopardizes your relationships.

In my case, I had to give that little girl the love she so needed in order to stop feeling lonely and stop making the same mistakes.

The only approval that I needed was my own! When I realized that, I started learning to love myself—regardless of my accomplishments—and I also developed compassion toward my father because I recognized that he was raised the same way he raised me.

He probably also felt he needed to be the best at everything he did in order to win his parents’ approval. And maybe he thought if I wasn’t the best at everything I did I would never be valued or loved by anyone else.

Understanding this enabled me to forgive him, break the cycle, and finally let him go.

So, what makes us slaves to anger, resentment, and abandonment issues? I think it’s the way we keep telling the story in our heads, and this is something that we can transform.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting we sweep things under the rug and pretend like nothing happened. We cannot change the past, and certainly we cannot turn a blind eye to it, but we can modify the way we retell the story to ourselves, and this can be a step toward inner healing.

I decided to give the difficult parts of my childhood experience another meaning. I edited the way I tell myself the story, and this is how it sounds now:

“My father was a strict man because he wanted me to succeed in life. He taught me to give my best in every task assigned to me; he didn’t make things easier for me because he wanted me to become strong in character and to find a solution in every situation. Daddy constantly challenged me because he wanted me to develop my potential to the fullest so I could face life and its difficulties.

I’m certain that when my father departed from this world, he did it in peace knowing that he left behind a strong and brave daughter.”

This is now the story of my childhood, and you know what? I think I like this version better! It’s helped me close the wound I had in my heart. My childhood left a scar, but it’s not hurting anymore.

My gift to you today is this: Close your eyes and picture a pencil. Do you know why a pencil has an eraser? To remove the things we don’t like, giving us the freedom to rewrite them into something that we feel more comfortable with.

You can’t change the facts from your past, but you can change how you interpret them, so feel rewrite as much as you need.

Your wounds will hurt a lot less when you broaden your perspective, try to understand the people who hurt you, and change the meaning of what you’ve been through.

February 9, 2021
3 Steps to Help You Embrace and Move Past Rejection

“Wisdom is merely the movement from fighting life to embracing it.” ~Rasheed Ogunlaru

There were many things I wasn’t prepared for when it came to baby raising: the constant self-doubt, the vocal opinions of others, teething that never ended. But the real shock was when my ten-month-old daughter rejected me.

It is human nature to avoid rejection. Nothing is more painful than trying your best or giving your heart and being told it’s not good enough or unwanted. In my case, I went beyond avoiding rejection—I denied the possibility of its existence.

My childhood experiences led me to believe that rejection was the most painful outcome of any situation.

My biological father won custody when my parents divorced and told me that my mother didn’t love me. At the same time, his alcoholism and own painful childhood didn’t allow him to love me unconditionally.

My fear of rejection was so profound that fleeing the mere possibility defined every aspect of my life.

In my twenties I changed friends, jobs, and cities with the frequency of oil changes. I lived in eleven apartments in six cities on both coasts, I had three different careers, and I spent most of the decade single.

If I perceived that someone didn’t reciprocate my feelings, romantically or platonically, I would walk away. If work required that I move beyond my comfort zone or take risks, I would quit. I was out spoken and passionate, but unwilling to be vulnerable to the possibility of rejection.

My fear kept me small. I lived a mediocre life. Avoiding rejection started to suffocate me.

In my thirties, I found the courage to love and to declare myself a writer—two prospects that ensure constant rejection. It was worth it. I was confident that I was healed, until my daughter rejected me.

My sister-in-law comes to our house and watches my daughter two or three times a week; I remain in my home office but am unavailable.

Recently, when my sister-in-law tried to hand me my daughter she began to cry and didn’t stop until her aunt took her back. I was devastated.

She was doing to me what I had promised to never do to her. I expected this from a teenager, not my ten-month-old daughter. Not the infant that I had delivered without a single drug, nursed, made sure never had diaper rash, prepared all her food, smiled, loved, and cuddled.

This may seem like a small and insignificant event, but it opened a deep wound of pain and sorrow. The rejection felt like walking through high school in my underwear, having my boss humiliate me in front of the entire office staff, and being audited by the IRS—simultaneously. It was horrible.

I immediately wanted to withdrawal and cut myself off from the pain. Only this time, I couldn’t; a rejection had finally happened with the one person I couldn’t walk away from—my daughter.

Here is what I learned:

1. Feel the pain.

Do you feel rejected? Do nothing that distracts from the pain. Accept what you feel, exactly as it is.

In moments that I can’t physically escape, I turn to food. The day I felt rejected by my daughter I ate half a bag of chocolate chips and shifted the pain of my heart to my belly. After the bellyache was gone I was left with the pain (and the guilt of overeating).

For you the temptation may be something else: social media, sex, drugs, exercise, work—anything that moves the ache from your heart to somewhere else. Any one of these things can be healthy and enjoyable, but not at the moment you feel rejected.

In this moment, allow yourself to feel the pain of rejection.

2. Know that rejection is not about your worth.

My terror of rejection stemmed from my inability to accept how it made me feel. I would immediately judge my inadequacy and enter into despair. When it happened with my daughter my first thought was that she didn’t love me and I was a failure as a mother.

Feeling the pain does not mean that you affirm your worst self-assessments.

When you feel rejected, do you do what I do and tell yourself that you weren’t enough: kind, smart, pretty, funny (enough)? Do you review every potential error you made along the way and wonder what you should have done differently? Stop.

You will never be beautiful enough, smart enough, kind enough, funny enough, to avoid rejection, because rejection is inevitable. Everyone gets rejected from time to time. And even if you believe you did something that led to the rejection, the issue would be that specific action, not your intrinsic worth.

Rejection isn’t about who you are as a person. There is nothing harder to believe and nothing more important.

3. Challenge your interpretation.

If you allow yourself to feel pain and don’t spiral into self-criticism, you will be more open to alternative possibilities: maybe it wasn’t even rejection.

Most of the time what we perceive as rejection is something entirely else. Many people in my life have felt rejected by me, when in fact I was protecting myself from their potential rejection. My daughter’s pediatrician assures me that she was not rejecting me.

You might have been rejected for that job because they already have someone with a similar background, and they were looking for someone with new skills to add to the team.

You might have been rejected romantically because that person simply wasn’t ready for a serious, committed relationship.

We can never know what exactly was happening in the moment that we felt rejected; all we can know for sure is that nothing ever means that we are unworthy. And with that knowledge we can choose not to be defined by any one interpretation.

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If we feel our emotions (pain, sadness, anger, whatever it may be) and don’t get stuck in negative self-assessments, then we can be open to other interpretations. It becomes less terrifying to take risks.

Embracing rejection gives us the freedom to be vulnerable and moves us to be gentler with ourselves. It increases our potential to love—others and ourselves.

If we push ourselves to feel, not judge, and challenge our interpretations the potential is great that our sense of self worth will grow and we will have the courage to risk what never seemed possible before.

This may mean that we will have even more rejection to embrace.

It is worth it.

Sad woman image via Shutterstock

October 27, 2015
Make a Tough Situation Good: One Question That Changes Everything

“The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.” ~Viktor E. Frankl

For my livelihood, I lead workshops on how to let go of stress and experience deeper happiness. My occupation makes my occasional meltdowns all the more embarrassing. Fortunately, a meltdown I had last year led me to a question that completely changed how I view difficult situations in my life.

As I was checking in at the airport a few months ago, I was told I did not have a ticket for my cross-country flight. Fortunately, I had my confirmation number with me—which I promptly gave to the agent.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Although you have a confirmation number, you’re not in our system. You can’t board this flight.”

A wave of self-pity, anger, and anxiety seared through my body. Fifty people were expecting me in New York City the next morning to talk about how to be happier. Yet, here I was fully stressed out and making this situation mean I’m an unlucky hypocrite.

I asked the ticket agent if there were any more tickets available.

“Yes,” she said enthusiastically as she typed away on her keyboard.

“Okay,” I thought. “Maybe it’s not going to be such a bad day after all. I’ve been saved.”

She continued, “But if you buy the same ticket you had before, instead of $600 round trip, it will cost you $3200.”

“I was right the first time,” I thought. “This means I’ve been totally screwed.”

I needed to get to New York ASAP, so I reluctantly, angrily, and self-righteously bought the stupid ticket.

The irony of the situation did not escape me. Here I was feeling self-pity and totally stressed out while buying a ticket to lead a workshop on happiness. The universe definitely has a sense of humor.

For a long time I’ve known I can choose my attitude and the meaning I give the events in my life. Yet, there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing it when the crap hits the fan.

Fortunately, the “ticket fiasco” I went through that day led me to create a simple question I can ask myself that has greatly impacted my daily life.

To make a long story short, I got to New York on time and led the workshop the next morning. That night I talked to the folks at United Air Lines and they confessed that my not “being in the system” was totally their fault.

In fact, they decided to refund the $3200 fare I had paid that day plus what I had previously paid for my ticket.

I actually ended up making $600. Now I was feeling like life is a bowl of cherries and everything works out for the best. It seemed like I had gone through a lot of bad feelings for nothing.

Then it hit me. I realized I often get “worked up” about things that frequently end up working out for the best. I wondered if there was a way to short-circuit this process so I didn’t spend so much time being unnecessarily stressed.

As I pondered this situation, I wondered, “What question could I ask myself that would help me when faced with difficult situations?” I saw that when things occur that I don’t like, I’m basically asking myself “What could be bad about this?”

Since I ask that question, my brain feels obliged to give me many reasons why something sucks.

So I wondered what it would be like to ask myself, “What could (potentially) be good about this?” when facing challenging situations.

In retrospect, I realized that had I asked this question when finding out I had no ticket, I might have come up with a couple of good answers.

I might have guessed it would ultimately lead to a good story, or a new technique—or even a refund beyond what I had paid. Of course, that’s what ended up happening, but it would have saved me a lot of grief had I imagined that outcome while in the ticket line.

Of course, no one knows what the future holds. Yet, it seems we habitually make the challenging events of our life mean things that lead to bad feelings.

If you’re going to make up things about the future, you may as well come up with a meaning that empowers you—rather than stresses you out.

For better or worse, over the next few weeks I had plenty of opportunities to practice this simple method. For example, when my tax bill was unexpectedly high, I asked, “What could be good about this?”

That answer was easy. It could mean I’m making more money than ever before; it could mean I get to help contribute to the government so they can provide services to people less fortunate than I.

When I got sick, I asked, “What could potentially be good about this?”

Begrudgingly I answered, “It’s a helpful wake up reminder that I need to take my vitamins and not work too many hours.” Though still sick, I immediately felt better now that I had attached an empowering meaning to my illness.

The ability to quickly create a positive meaning to the events in our life is a great aid to being happy. Yet, this is the exact opposite of what our mind normally does. We normally create negative, disempowering meanings whenever things seemingly “go wrong.”

The question, “What could (potentially) be good about this?” is a simple way to change how we interpret each situation in our life. So when you get in an argument with your partner, you can see that disagreement as a doorway to deeper intimacy—rather than a doorway to depression.

When the argument is over, you don’t really know what the future holds. You may as well create a meaning that empowers you. Through such empowerment, you’ll feel better and you’ll be more likely to act in a helpful manner.

Nowadays, I frequently ask myself, “What could be good about this?” I always come up with at least two answers, even if I don’t believe them. I find that it immediately makes me feel better—and more empowered.

Instead of life feeling like a battle I need to put up with, it feels like I’m being given useful challenges that will eventually lead to a happy ending. It’s a much better way to live than being the victim of a mind that always delivers bad news.

Photo by wesleynitsckie

May 12, 2013
Letting Go of Stories About Other People

“The biggest problem for humanity, not only on a global level, but even for individuals, is misunderstanding.” ~Rinpoche

Someone cuts you off in traffic.

What a jerk!

A date stands you up.

She obviously doesn’t like you.

Your colleague gives you a dirty look across the room.

Your last email must have really pissed him off!

In so many places in our lives, we see a behavior and automatically make a meaning out of it. Everything from a glance to an email gets snappily run through our minds and attached to a reaction or feeling.

Part of this is biological. As animals, we’re built to rapidly process information so that we can react quickly, if need be. It’s how survival instincts work.

However, most things we’re reacting to aren’t life-or-death level situations.

Here’s how I work with my own brain to stop getting so upset by all these little situations. I call it “Alternate Stories.” (more…)

November 3, 2009