HYPNOTHERAPY

P R A C T I TO N E R D I P LO M A

THE LIFE STORY

WORKSHEET
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WHAT’S IN A STORY?

There is power in writing your own stories, but what exactly is a story? There is increasing
evidence that our neurobiology in some way reflects the way in which we have evolved
over the past 1 million to 100,000 years, that is, since we learnt to speak. We don’t precisely
know when we discovered the power of speech, but what we do know is that our ability to
utilise fire, which began roughly 1.5 million years ago, unlocked calorific potential in food that
allowed our large brains to develop.

A brain takes about 300 calories a day to run even if it’s not doing much. We couldn’t possibly
afford such a luxury without being very good at unlocking calories to run it on. However,
we did and the growth in our brains seems to have gone hand in hand with our ability to
communicate. This new ability suddenly opened up incredible potential, we no longer needed
to live according to immediate genetic imperatives, we could rely on ‘received’ information
and start exploring areas of existence and understanding beyond food and reproduction.

For millennia the way in which knowledge and wisdom were passed down through the
generations was via stories. This enabled us to build knowledge in a way that is not possible
for any other creature on the earth. This meant that each successive generation no longer had
to go and learn exactly the same as the previous generation, they could receive knowledge
through stories and go on to build on that knowledge through their own experiences.

Furthermore, our brains have learnt to organise our experiences in ‘narratives’ or stories.
When we seek to recall an experience or memory, we don’t call up a spreadsheet of available
data, we recall a narrative - “I put on my old coat while Peter made sandwiches, we drove
for fifty miles before spotting the hotel and deciding that’s where’d stop…” Events and
observations are stored in this chain of experiences and perceptions that are our stories.

We know from attempting to piece together precise recollections of crimes, that even in this
situation witnesses can remember the same events differently. We are not recording devices
storing video for later recall, instead, we are sense-making, interpreting beings who turn our
sensory data into strings of meaningful impressions. These can be a mixture of ordinary sense
data - sound, taste, touch, sight as well as more reactive data - fear, joy, sadness, excitement.
We can also include our contemporaneous judgements, “I remember he was behaving
terribly”, this becomes a shorthand for the dissection of a series of behaviours. It may also
result in data no longer required being dismissed from our memories.

The end result of this process is the stories that we tell ourselves about what has occurred
in our lives. We know that such stories can contain any number of distortions or unhelpful
elements that are not a true reflection of the situations recalled. Curiously, it happens to be
much easier to retain such distortions as long as these stories remain in our minds. If we have
to start writing these stories down then we are forced to question our own narrative. We are
the first editors of our own perceptions and recollections. There is an important power in such
a process, as we are compelled to confront our own narratives.

There is another way in which the writing of the story can be enormously helpful. When we
have genuinely suffered significant trauma, the act of pulling trauma out of our heads and
putting it down in black and white is a process of instantiation. We are in some way
giving substance to that trauma, yet also setting boundaries around it. While they
still remain in the mind, they are free to morph and haunt our thinking as and when
they like. Once written down, it draws out that power, the writer is taking control of
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the event rather than the event controlling the individual.

This process is not without its repercussions at times, and the more trauma there might
have been, then the more the writing may ‘stir the silt’, reawakening old feelings for a time.
However it will be temporary, and the longer term effect will be one of laying demons to rest,
allowing more mental capacity for creating the life that we now want.

Where have I come from? (write an account of your past and give yourself time for any
emotional fallout to settle before moving on)
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The second story you will write is about where you are now. This has a different kind of
power. This is a process of acknowledging what you are doing and what you are avoiding,
this story will be about the good and bad of you as you are now, with all your strengths
and all your weaknesses written into the text. If your story is only one or the other, it is likely
a rather unbalanced story and a reflection of your state of mind rather than an accurate
representation of you as you are now. Even this bias, however, can be instructive.

Where am I now?
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Now it is time to let your imagination free, to let your desires and dreams off the leash and
to write an account of where it is that you would like to go in the future. This is no place for
conservatism. If your internal critical voice starts saying, ‘You might want that, but there’s
no chance of actually getting it’, then you have to take a moment to silence that voice and
reassert your control over your critic, rather than letting it control you. This is your story and
you can write what you want. As you write, just be sure to keep checking that you are writing
what it is that you want and that you aren’t inadvertently writing someone else’s story (your
mother’s desire, your father’s desire, your spouse’s desire etc). If you find yourself starting
to write someone else’s vision of what you should be heading for, take out the red pen, put
a cross through it and a big note stating whose story that really is. Then try again, making it
yours.

Where do I want to go?

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