This image stopped me in my tracks when I saw it earlier this week.
The piece that stopped me is the belief definition: “A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.” (Emphasis mine) So we tell ourselves stories, FOR YEARS, and as we continue to tell them, they become truer in our own minds just because of the repeated telling. Holy crap, does that make sense.
And that belief? It is often one that is limiting. And it is also not true.
Why do we perpetuate this stuff?
I have been wallowing in some stories for years. The “I’m not smart enough,” the “I’m not worthy of love,” the “My needs are not important,” the “I’m too emotional and reactive about things.” What I have recently realized is that it is not just me telling myself stories that are untrue, it’s when the people in your life validate them because validating them works in their favor. Figuring this out was a major ah ha moment for me. It also makes it so much harder to unwind.
As I have been working through much of this stuff post divorce, I have realized that there were two people in my life who should have helped me navigate this space differently but instead had me navigate space that benefited them. My mother was the first and my ex-husband was the second. Both of them dealt with similar issues which really distilled down to a lack of self confidence. The fear that someone would see the “real” them, broken and not enough. They both felt that if someone else succeeded, they did not. They both told themselves terrible stories about not being good enough, smart enough, lovable enough. Both of them actually being capable, smart, loveable, and enough.
I understand more about how my mother’s self confidence was shaken than I do my ex-husbands but they both used the wisdom and perception I have to strengthen who they were at my expense. My mother would never enlist the help of a therapist although I am certain it would have been helpful to her. My ex-husband finally did post divorce and I hope he has discovered things that will help him navigate his future in different ways from how he navigated his past.
The thing that was hard was that I didn’t really realize it was at my expense, instead I thought I was somehow broken or just not good enough, no matter what I did or how hard I tried. I had feelings of disquiet, feelings in the pit of my stomach, feelings of shame for all the pieces that didn’t fit. I tried to problem solve this for years and sadly, with my mother, her death was a release for me.
At the end, she was on hospice and I came to Colorado from New Jersey to help my dad. He had been in the throws of caregiving for months (years really as her cancer progressed) and he was just putting one foot in front of the other. She had stopped eating much, a spoonful of ice cream or applesauce at a time, but still had a bunch of medicines she needed to swallow. And swallowing had become very difficult.
I took a look at the medicines he had laid out for her and we talked about what each thing did and if it was still necessary. One of the biggest pills was a stool softener, and with what she was ingesting and where she was on her journey, it was totally unnecessary. By taking that away from her she told me I was killing her. That was the last thing she said to me. She died two days later. Even at the end, she couldn’t defer to my wisdom and practicality. I wish I could say at that moment I realized all of this. But I am today years old when I figured this out.
Working thorough this has been cathartic and hard. And when you repeat how you do things because they are familiar, it’s hard not to find that you are at fault with the circumstances you find yourself living through. With my ex-husband, I saw someone who was broken by the death of his father and I thought I could help him fix that. Spoiler alert, you can’t fix anyone, it has to come from within. But for me the nuances of the relationship were more familiar to me because I what I lived with growing up. And I signed up for the familiar rather than the healthy. It has taken me years to separate the two.
Oh, the stories we tell ourselves.
It seems to always come back to the stories we tell ourselves and how we make sense of them. Familiar is not healthy, just something we think we know. The habit of those stories become part of who we are in toxic ways. They weave threads through our lives and when we upend them, it feels like we are letting go of ourselves. We really aren’t. We are making the space for the real us to step up and be seen. It can be daunting and extremely uncomfortable as we get to know the new normal. But with anything worth having, the work is what needs to be done and there are benefits to be found.
My biggest benefit has been better sleep. I used to wake up and ruminate about stuff that I believed I was not doing well enough or being present enough. There was a ton of brow beating happening at 2 or 3 in the morning. With this newly understood reality, I might wake up to pee as any woman of a certain age does, but the voices have been mercifically silent. And that is work that I have done.
Today I am hopeful that some of you reading this will discover some voices you are listening to are just not worth listening to anymore. As you are able, send them packing. It might take a few efforts to quell them, but they need to be silenced. You deserve to be telling yourself stories that are rooted in the truth. Find a trusted person who can help you navigate the space without having any need to control your outcome. This work is hard to do alone.
Listen to those voices, ask yourself “how true is that really” and put them firmly out of your life. It’s powerful stuff. And you can do it.
What stories do you need to stop telling yourself? Let’s get started, you will be glad you did.