Uncovering Your Reality

What if you didn’t have to argue with it?

What if the thing that happened, although it may have been painful, wasn’t actually the problem?

What if you could get okay with the experience and simply adjust your own way of seeing things?

Shifting your perspective isn’t about taking the bad thing that happened and trying to make it positive. It’s about removing the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization that cause you to make the experience worse than it was.

The stories offer pain on their own, completely outside of the experience. Even if the experience had never happened, if you started telling those stories you would feel the pain of them.

You don’t need experience to feel pain. You feel pain through the thoughts in your head. Think about that. You can make up a story and feel pain. It doesn’t have to be true. It doesn’t have to be real. It can be complete fiction and it will cause you pain.

Now think about the experience that caused you pain. Yes, the experience was painful. You didn’t like it. That’s totally fine. What are you adding to that through your thoughts?

You filled up your pain cup with the experience. Then you let your brain do its thing and it overflows the pain cup. It adds to a cup that’s already full because it tells stories that essentially defend the pain. The stories offer reasons why your pain exists. In some ways, the stories help to validate your pain for you. Not only do they validate the pain, they also encourage more pain.

Why does the mind do that?

This is how your mind protects you. I know that seems weird, but this is the mind offering you pain as a way to get you to protect yourself. If you tell stories of how you’re a victim of your experience, that makes you defend yourself and that’s what the mind wants because then you’re less likely to get hurt again in the future. You’ll start trying to prevent the scenario from happening again by trying to control your experience.

We know that we can’t control our experience. Trying to defend ourselves by controlling the external world isn’t a strategy that’s going to work for you. That’s not to say that people don’t do it all the time, because they do. But usually they just wind up frustrated and stressed. It offers more pain without actually fixing the original pain that started the whole thing.

The stories become a vicious loop and they keep you stuck in a cycle of pain. The story validates the emotion and the emotion validates the story. You go back and forth.

I’m going to be honest with you here: emotion is not validating your story. The emotion is the result of the story you’re telling. What the emotion says is that the story you’re telling is painful to you. The emotion is asking you to stop telling that story so that you don’t have to be in pain anymore.

The stories become a form of self-harm. We intentionally hurt ourselves with these stories all the time. We don’t even realize we do it because we’re so used to allowing our mind to make up these stories. The story isn’t true. It’s just you hurting yourself. You don’t see it that way because the story seems real in your head.

Those thoughts become award winning movie scripts that we buy into. Have you ever watched a movie you knew was fiction, but seemed too real to be fiction? That’s what you do to yourself in your head.

The argument is that this person said this or did that to you. You’re not making up the story of victimization because you were a victim of their actions or words. Maybe you were on the receiving end of whatever they said or did, but you’re still not a victim of it. Being on the receiving end of something doesn’t automatically make you a victim. Not having control over what’s happening doesn’t automatically make you a victim.

What makes you a victim?

The story you tell yourself about what they said or did. That’s it.

The experience is just a person projecting pain. It’s a person lashing out at you in some way. That’s all it is. That projection of pain had nothing to do with you. It was all about them. You were just convenient to them in that moment. Nothing else.

See the experience as nothing more than a projection of pain that you were on the receiving end of.

The story of “they did that to me” makes you a victim of their actions or words. Yes something happened to you. You had an experience. You took on the pain of another person and you weren’t given the choice to accept it or not. That made it out of your control.

Where is your point of control?

What you do with that in your head. We don’t have to make the experience positive. It was a bad experience. We just have to control the story we tell about it. The minute the lack of control over our experience makes us a victim or we start blaming people for things, we offer ourselves additional pain that wasn’t part of the original experience.

There is added pain in the idea of “they did that to me”. The experience was painful enough. This concept of having things done to us creates more pain above and beyond the experience itself.

Abraham Hicks often says “everything happens for you”. Why does she say that? Because the story of things happening to you makes you a victim and causes you pain. Even though you didn’t have control over the experience, the experience happened for a reason. I know, people hate that idea. Why do they hate it? Because it gets caught up in their story of victimization. “Things happen to punish me.” “Things happen because I’m a bad person.” “Things happen because I don’t deserve…”

When an experience shows you pain, there is purpose in that. What did the pain trigger within you? What old wound did the experience poke at? What story are you telling about yourself that is being validated by this bad experience?

I used my experience to validate my pain too. Every time something would happen, even something really small, it would validate my story of “I’m not allowed to…”. It would validate the story of powerlessness that I was telling.

How did I shift that?

By seeing what people were saying differently. I had to shift my perception of what people were saying and I had to understand that they were projecting their own fears and pain. I needed to learn that it wasn’t my job to take on their trauma and live from it.

My shift in perspective allowed me to let everybody off the hook. I stopped arguing with my experience because I saw it differently. I saw what they were doing as a projection of their pain, realized I didn’t have to take on their pain or live from it, and then I was able to drop it.

That’s your work as well. When you can see it as a projection of somebody else’s pain, realize your don’t have to take it on even if they did something to you directly, it allows you to let it go more easily.

Your fear of doing this comes from the idea that you think you’re dropping your guard. It makes you feel really unprotected. Those stories become a shield you wear. When you stop telling the stories it’s like you drop the shield.

When we do this it doesn’t mean we’re leaving ourselves wide open. It doesn’t mean we’re turning ourselves into a doormat. It doesn’t mean we’re just going to let everybody do whatever they want to us. We can still stand our ground, defend ourselves when we need to, and hold our own.

By dropping the story we’re only dropping the extra pain. We’re not dropping our armor completely. Don’t use the fear as an excuse to stay stuck in the story of pain that you tell. The fear is lying to you. It’s not true.

The fear is validating the idea that the stories protect you. That’s where we started this blog from. I started with that idea. Your fear of dropping them validates that. The stories aren’t protecting you. They are actually hurting you. All it will take is for you to drop a few of them and you will see that, if you can widen your perspective far enough to be able to see the bigger picture.

You don’t have to argue with it.

You don’t have to tell stories about it.

You can just accept the experience for what it is – a projection of pain by somebody else.

It’s not yours and you don’t have to take it on.

Love to all.

Della

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