I hope your week is going well. In your everyday life there are many interactions and things that happen. Do you have any stories to share? Stories are an important way 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, it’s a way of letting go of painful episodes and loose ends. Each time you tell your story, it allows your mind to regroup and organize. It also empowers your voice. The regrouping and reorganizing is one of the reasons your story of the affair or the cheater’s version of the affair changes. Each time you re-examine it, you see new things and nuances.
The way your brain is organized, each time you tell the story, something shifts. This represents your brain changing and reorganizing 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’s not that the events changed, what you notice and pay attention to changes.
When you’re finally able to tell your story without crying or feeling like you’re going to vomit, it’s a good sign that you’ve done some work on yourself. It means you’ve mourned the losses, grieved what couldn’t be, and made peace with what is. You no longer feel the need to protect yourself from real or imagined threats.
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.
The first step is to begin writing your story. It can be a painful process, but it’s worth it. The benefits are many. You’ll have a written record of what happened that you can refer to. It will help you make sense of things and see the progress you’ve made.
I go into more detail about how what you call events impact your thinking in the webinar ‘Getting you past the affair crisis’.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
