Past Present: Strengthening All RelationshipsSample

Retraining patterns of thought that have felt normal to you throughout your adult life is not easy. However, it is possible if you’re willing to start with the discipline of taking three explicit steps: recognize the root, refute the untruth, and revise the belief. Let’s look at each one.

1. Recognize the root: To recognize the root means to have an accurate understanding of any untrue, unhelpful, or misguided messages you brought from childhood into adulthood. This is the most difficult part of rewriting your plot and healing your story. It requires staying open to the possibility that you may not yet fully understand your messages of the wound, and so make it a practice to continually notice and isolate the unhelpful messages you are trying to repair. . .

2. Refute the untruth: For some, just the awareness that messages of the wound exist—and are not true—creates enough insight to refute those beliefs. But for most of us, our responses to those long-held distortions are so reflexive and subconscious that we need additional insight, practice, and time to be able to refute them.

As soon as we become aware that a thought or behavior is likely being spawned by a message of the wound, we must do what we can at that moment to refute the distorted belief. Whenever you catch yourself thinking or behaving according to your messages of the wound, stop and remind yourself, “That’s not true!” Don’t give those untrue beliefs a free pass. They have no place in your future, and the process of retraining your thinking means you need to be unflinching in giving them the boot each and every time they show up. . .

3. Revise the belief: Revising or replacing distorted beliefs means retraining your brain to respond in a new way when you spot thoughts or behaviors that reflect those distorted beliefs. When you see yourself going down the familiar, unproductive path, choose a different and better response. . .

Story repair is a necessary but less-than-easy process to go through as we walk toward healing and better relationships.