What’s your story? Everyone has a story when it comes to affairs. Stories are an important way that you make sense of things and organize your mind. Telling your affair story is important for you. It’s important for many others like you as well.
Stories have a healing quality to them. When you tell a story, its’ a way of letting go of painful episodes and loose ends. Each time you tell your story, your mind regroups and reorganizes your thinking about the affair. This is one of the reasons your story of the affair or the cheater’s version of the affair changes.
Even in your own mind, each time you tell the affair story something will change. This is because each time you go through your story, you process more of it which will show up in how you tell the story. Different items will be emphasized and different meanings attached to it. It’s not that the affair changed, what changed is your understanding of it and the meanings attached.
The way your brain is organized, each time you tell the story, something shifts. This represents your brain changing and reorganizing the events. Each time the story is told, new connections are made in your brain and the story takes a new pathway through your memories. It’ not that the events changed, what you notice and pay attention to changes.
It’s not by accident that Frank Sinatra rarely sang the same song the same way. In a similar manner, you’ll never tell your story the same way each time. New insights, new connections and new meanings will change what comes out.
He was never accused of being a liar or falsehood as a performer for changing his song. The different versions you hear about the affair reveal the changes occurring in the thinking of the cheater and yourself.
Your stories are the way you make sense of the affair and what happened to you. The way you tell it is unique to you. Your choice of words, your choice of events that stand out, and your way of expressing them are statements about you. Just in the choice of words as to whether you call it an affair, adultery, cheating, catting around, straying, sleeping around or something else, it says something about you, your values and your understanding of events.
I go into more detail about how what you call events impacts your thinking in the webinar ‘Getting you past the affair crisis‘.
Best Regards,
Jeff
