I’ve been silent for a long time. I needed to get my head back in the game, and it’s taken a while.

To help me get to a good space, I have been working on behavior modification therapy. I have heard abs are made in the kitchen as well as the gym… but no one really said anything about how my heart and brain talked to each other.

Yes, I have been in counseling. Yes, I have issues. I learn something new every day. This week, I was challenged to try an activity. The activity was to write down a situation you have been in. Right here and now. Write down the situation, the way you feel, the good and the bad. Tell the story of how you got to this situation.

Go ahead, write it down. It’s a good exercise.

After I wrote my story, I was told to read it to myself. So I did…

My story was about something that hurt, made me very angry, left me without sleep from frustration. I talked about how the situation developed, who I was angry with, and look what it’s done to me.

The last part of the activity was to rewrite the whole thing, where I felt good about myself, how I handled the situation, and the lessons I could learn from it to help me grow.

Wait a dang minute! I just wrote about how angry I was. How I lost sleep. How I wanted to eat every salty sugary thing I could lay my hands on… now I have to find a way to spin it to “happy”?

Yes! The therapy was designed to help me find a voice of reason. By rewriting the story I discovered I could see where I could have handled the anger differently (maybe better.) I also learned that had I set a boundary, and simply said “thank you for your opinion”, I could have walked away long before it escalated. Turns out, I have a lot of really good tools to help me deal with high stress. And, bonus I did not eat my way through it!!!

I finally felt really proud of the work I did, and was talking to the person who challenged me to this activity. I was waiting for the congratulations, I knew I did good. You know what she said? “No one focuses on the positive in the first story.”

Wham! Every single person (granted, we are in therapy for a reason) focused on a negative situation, and had to rewrite the entire story.

Moral to my story, stop letting your story be in hind sight. Find the happy story and keep writing it!