Believe it Or Not Transcript

Liz: The reason we call this podcast, “Believe it or Not”, is it has to do with what we choose to believe. The stories we ascribe meaning to, that we feel is somehow essential to our identity, and we want to pick apart those stories and we want to pick apart why story is so important to us.

Rhea: A lot of Season One we talk about in various different episodes my experiences and how much they were colored by the stories I told myself past, present, future, and those stories very much dictated my reactions, my perceptions and my then present experiences as a result. And I still see that today totally.

Liz: Whenever we write a personal narrative in our minds, even if we're not writing it down, we tend to add things to the story to make it interesting, especially if we plan to tell somebody else the story.

Rhea: We also tend to project meaning, where we don't know there is meaning as well.

Liz: Yes. Have you ever sort of read either an autobiography or memoir, and you already kind of can fill in some of the blanks because you've seen the movie, you've seen the story, so you're reading this and you're like, why didn't the person just put that in there? Why didn't they describe this experience that I read about before? Why didn't that make the cut? What one person determines is an important part of their story is not necessarily going to be the story that's important to you. What takes on a certain amount of significance or importance is what you can connect to.

Rhea: You experience something but you experience it through the filter of your past experiences, what's happened before, and either it's coming from a place of fear, it's coming from a place of shame or it's coming from a place of wholeness depending on what it is and how much work you've done on yourself.

Liz: Well so often what we're recalling from the past is the pain. If something was whole and peaceful and wonderful, generally either we forgotten it or it's just a pleasant memory, but one that does not need to be shared. Often we're telling stories in order to heal. So we might be rehashing some old childhood stuff, not really telling the whole story because our brains might say, that was a really uncomfortable thing when that happened, so why don't we just not mention that piece, or that was really embarrassing, so why don't we kind of keep that one out of the story. What are we telling that's truth? What are we telling that's not? What's an exaggeration? What are we leaving out? Because it's all those holes in our story that are important because sometimes it's so often those bits that we leave out.

Rhea: So if I tell a story, I will tell it in a way that makes me sound better than I felt.

Liz: Absolutely.

Rhea: So that I can almost rewrite my own history.

Liz: Well, you can make it less painful, but it still stays with you. Sometimes it's still like, yeah, no, that was still a defining moment and that's why certain people still stick out in our mind because they were involved with that, but we may not know them anymore.

Rhea: So is it usually the stories that you're trying to heal, they are the stories that you tell people?

Liz: Oh, all the time. Over and over and over again.

Rhea: So if I don't tell a specific story, is it because I don't need to heal from it?

Liz: All depends on how it makes you feel inside when you think of that story. Am I not telling this story because I don't want to make myself seem like an idiot or a fool if I share it with others?

Rhea: When it happens to you it's painful, but when you retell it, you make a comedy as well, like you change the emotion as you're telling the story. And there was this one story once, I remember there was this guy and I really liked him for a while and one day he said, “Do you want to go to the cinema?” And so we go to the movies and it was the most uncomfortable . . . . When I think about it, my stomach contracts. I get in the car and he drops me home and I'm suddenly standing in front of my house or maybe in my house at this point, I don't know. And I'm like, no, that didn't go how it should have gone and you know me style, I need to fix it. So I then call him and I say, “Listen, I don't have my keys.” And so he was like, “Oh, no problem. Come here.” So I go there. We are chilling then and then all of a sudden this realization that he had seen me get my keys out of my bag and go into my house.

Liz: I don't even know what to say to that.

Rhea: And honestly, I don't tell this story like this. I tell it in a really comedy way, and it can be hilarious when told properly, but it was so embarrassing. You can make it comedy, but actually the story is shame.

Liz: Yeah, it's shame.

Rhea: It's shame from being inauthentic and not having any self-worth.

Liz: But I'm right there with you. I have a list of stories that also brought me shame, but I wouldn't necessarily share it. In part because I felt like if I was putting it out there, then I would somehow have to give every detail and I just wasn't ready for that. So what you do? You sort of keep it in, you keep it in. Maybe you'll tell one person, but what you said about being authentic, that's the point which is so often in holding onto these stories and the retelling and the retelling, but not really the telling, the honest telling, that doesn't bring healing. That just makes it less painful. It is all about being authentic, right? And when we're not being our authentic selves, that's when we're living in shame.

Rhea: Because it's funny, all the stories that I hesitate to tell are the ones that normally include me being embarrassed about somehow how I acted in front of a member of the opposite sex. And actually when I think about it, the reason why I feel that way about each one is that I can tell you that wasn't myself. I was trying to get a desired outcome.

Liz: Trying to impress.

Rhea: Or trying to manipulate.

Liz: When we're rewriting it, we're often also trying to avoid judgment.

Rhea: Normally when I feel like I don't want to tell a story, it's because I can't own my actions. I can't own who I was in that story because they're so far from me. So I almost try and change the details so that it's palatable and I can say, yep, I feel now authentic in that story, even though I wasn't acting authentically at all.

Liz: Really funny how much we depend on story to shape our perception, the world around us, of who we are and all of our relationships. All of the stories that we told ourselves, all these things that we've held onto that have shaped who we are, these points of reference in our memories that we go back to time and again to explain what we're doing and why we're doing it, those are all finished. We are tying up all of these stories, or having to see that we've relied so much on these stories to shape us, that we lost sight of the fact that we are not the person in those stories. You know, they mean nothing but in the end, everything, while they've gotten us to this point and we recognize all the healing we've had to do, what that healing was meant to do for us to take us was to the point where, wait a second, I am not that person in this story. That story does not define myself at all. We spent lifetime after lifetime rehashing the same story. I am not loved, I am unlovable and finding different scenarios to play that out and now all of a sudden here we are—in body, awake, conscious—thinking I'm lovable, I'm loved, I am love. Do any of those stories really matter anymore? Do those really define who I am?

Rhea: My old stories don't apply, but they are still part of what makes me whole. Those experiences still happened.

Liz: They did, and it's not about negating the experience. It's not about erasing it, but it's about acknowledging that the person we were in the stories don't exist anymore, and that those stories do not define us as much as we believed that they did.

Rhea: What would you say to someone who still believes that their stories define them?

Liz: Then there's something there that hasn't been healed. If you're holding onto a story, then there's clearly something that you need to get to the root of, cause if you're choosing to hold onto a story, then there's a reason, and I would honor that reason, but to also understand and acknowledge and hopefully get to the point where they can acknowledge the fact that they are so much greater than that story has led them to believe.

Rhea: So basically what you're saying is once you heal a story, once you look at it differently, it just no longer has the power over you anymore. You're not repeating it again and again and again to see it.

Liz: You have fully integrated the lesson. It's kind of like what you're first learning to drive and you're hypervigilant and you're so aware, but then the longer you're at it, the more it just kind of becomes second nature.

Rhea: I do agree with you in the sense that we are not the people who are in those stories because once you heal a story, it no longer has the same power over you. It's no longer as scary. I would argue that we are still the sum of our stories. Once you heal each story, that story gets rewritten.

Liz: Well, there's wholeness. You're taking all the little holes in the story and you’ve sealed them up and you found wholeness.

Rhea: You can tell yourself, Oh, I never get the guy, let's say, because they're the only ones you remember. You don't remember all the guys you rejected. You just remember the guys that rejected you. So once you start looking at that and healing that and you suddenly see that there's a bit of both, that actually there's much more of an equilibrium. The person who you were that believed the story of 'I never get the guy' dies, and a new person is in that place which has said, well sometimes I have and sometimes I haven't.

Liz: Once we have healed the story, it is done. It is finished. We really don't have anything to do with the story anymore because we've integrated it fully, but it's not the story. It's the lesson from it that we're really looking to integrate. So we're not really the sum of our stories.

Rhea: We are the sum of our lessons.

Liz: Exactly, by really trying to get to the root of that lesson as opposed to just sort of flinging blame around. And once we've learned the lesson, we're no longer in that karmic loop. We're no longer in the loop of our stories. We are then able to release ourselves from the hold that story has on us and then we can move forward.

Rhea: When you're telling a story and you're processing that story, how do you then heal it?

Liz: It's important when you are telling the story, you ask yourself, why did I create this?

Rhea: If everything's a mirror, what's being reflected back at me?

Liz: I am the architect of my life so I designed this so perfectly to teach me something.

Rhea: Because obviously when we're talking about shadow work, and we're talking about the things that you don't like in yourself, you will see in other people. Just as the things that you like in yourself, you will see in other people. When you are in a situation, a story as it were, which is triggering you, which is making you feel negative in some way, is a reflection of how you feel about yourself, about something, some form of shadow that is still unhealed in you. When we talk about repeating patterns or stories that still cause us pain, what it means is when you say the lesson is not integrated, what I would say is that aspect of ourselves that we have somehow rejected, hasn't been owned, hasn't been taken responsibility for, and hasn’t been integrated as part of who we are. Once that's healed, it means nothing, which is how we are then no longer our stories.

Liz: And to get to the lesson, it's important that we not hold judgment and when we tell stories, we're judging them as we're telling them, we're judging them as we're designing them. I'm going to leave this out. I'm going to keep this in. All of your stories, they don't have to define you anymore. That the person you wake up tomorrow morning doesn't have to be the person that you were when you went to bed.

Rhea: How do you do that?

Liz: Freeing ourselves from our past, from the mistakes, regrets, the traumas, the pain, the wound, it's four things. Number one, you accept fully that it happened. There is absolutely no rewriting it. No matter what kind of filter you put on it, no matter how much humour you add to the story, it happened. It happened the way you prefer not to remember it happened, but it fucking happened. Two, that it was a choice. It was your choice, however conscious or not. Like it or not, we do stupid things when we're growing up because how else do we learn? Number three, you cannot go back and rewrite it no matter how many times you try, because you can't change it. It's done. It's over. And number four that you are here because of it, not in spite of it.

Rhea: I was thinking about something that I'd done to help me heal, where I would look at the story that had somehow caused me trauma. I would write it, the truth of it, but then I would look at how I'm a better person because of it, and in being able to appreciate it happening rather than wishing it never did, it allowed me to integrate it. So for example, when we look at the unrequited love story, I even now can still say, you are a good man and if I had to experience these things with someone, I'm glad it was you, and that was how I healed it. Does that make sense?

Liz: Yeah.

Rhea: So for example, with the ghost stuff, I have so much to be grateful for that had nothing to do with the ghosting. That really did change my life in a different way. Sometimes it's about looking at that story as it was, taking responsibility for your part in it in a real way. So saying, you might've done this to me, but I did this to you and to me too, whatever that was.

Liz: We created the scenario together.

Rhea: And I created my perception of this scenario alone as well.

Liz: I have me to thank for the rewrite.

Rhea: Yeah, exactly.

Liz: The edited version.

Rhea: But at the same time I could continue to focus on the parts that caused me pain, or I could try and look at the parts where I'm a better person because of it, and there are going to be those two. There's always going to be one way that you somehow learned to love yourself a bit more.

Liz: And sometimes you will not get to that point of, I am a better person because . . . until you can really learn to take responsibility and learn to love it fully and embrace it completely.

Rhea: I feel I am only able to love it fully and embrace it completely once I can see . . .

Liz: Once you've seen the benefit.

Rhea: Removing the responsibility of yourself from any story is a sure fire way to have it repeat again, because at the time, it might make you feel better because it wasn't your fault, but in reality, you're not learning whatever you're meant to learn, so it will happen again. Your negative emotions are there to show you something. So if it doesn't feel good that you did that, acknowledge that it doesn't feel good ‘cause then you learn not to do it again.

Liz: And that's why we call this episode Believe it or Not. Our story is about what we choose to believe about ourselves, what we're willing to believe, good or bad, positive, negative, that reflect back our own self-judgment.

Rhea: In one respect, it's kind of believe the story or not, the story happened as it did happen, so you better fucking process it the way it happened, rather than tell yourself a weird version of it that's going to back up the other story behind it that you've told yourself about you

Liz: Exactly.

Rhea: That judgment story piece. All the stories we tell are basically just reflections of the story we're telling ourselves.

Liz: However you've designed that story, once you've gotten to the point where you've healed it and ultimately in that path of spiritual maturity that we're going to explore this season, it's everything about understanding you are not that story. Period. Maybe it felt like you were when you were experiencing it. Maybe it felt like you were when you were processing it. Maybe you were stuck in it a little too long. Whatever you choose to believe, that's still a very, very, very small piece of who you really are.

Rhea: You tell your story, the big stories that are played out in the smallest stories in reality, but that's only one person's perspective. Everyone will have their own story about you, and you may or may not know them. You may or may not agree with them. Some of them you might really like. Some of them you might have outgrown, some of them may not have ever existed in the first place. So just as much as you aren't the story you've told yourself, you aren't the story that the person you met when you were four years old for an hour in the playpen thinks you are either. We think that because we've spent more time with ourselves, we know ourselves better, but we are not the stories we tell ourselves, just as much as we aren't the stories people tell us about ourselves, and in every moment we are a different person. So we aren't our stories.

Liz: No, and the less significance we attached to our stories, the more connected we can become to that greater being that we really are.