My Story
Let’s take a minute and learn about me through some of the story I lived, the stories I told myself, and how I changed those stories to create the life I wanted.
The Story I Lived starts with a lot of stories that I was told. I was raised in a cult. I was subjected to stories, not just from sacred texts and narratives spun from that, but also stories from my family. Those stories impacted the life that I lived. Let’s just take a few.
“The heart is treacherous” was a common refrain that I heard, the point being not to trust yourself. We were to trust them, those men that made the decisions for right and wrong inside the cult. Can you see how it might impact a person to not trust themselves? It set me up for a life where I followed them and what they wanted and continually put my own desires away. It led to living a very inauthentic existences, and I say existence because it wasn’t living.
“This world is dying and the end is coming any day now, don’t invest in what is essentially the Titanic”. Yeah, really. I was discouraged from pursuing higher education, from pursuing recreation, from figuring out who I was and what I wanted in life. I knew people without life insurance because they really put no value on this life as this one was to be endured and the next one enjoyed. Can you see how that story led me to downplay any ambition or drive that I may have had, any real zest for life?
Life outside the cult was portrayed in artist illustrations as nothing but crime, immorality, violence, and greed. We weren’t to be friends with “worldly” people on the outside as they were a danger to our spirtuality and salvation. Can you see the skewed view that would give me of everyone on the outside? I was in public but very isolated as I didn’t trust outsiders and was told not to.
So I passed on college, got married young as is usually the case in the cult, devoted my thoughts and feelings and actions to them. I lived a depressed and very inauthentic life. I was a very judgmental person, using the story I was told to judge everyone, including myself. I eventually put on a lot of weight, got deeply in debt, and became suicidal. It’s hard to be happy while living someone else’s story.
I Changed My Story. First I started getting healthy mentally and emotionally. As I studied happiness, love, vulnerability, emotional abuse, narcissism, codependence, and so much more, I started to see that the stories I was told were lies. I started seeing how those stories impacted me negatively as I played out roles that were given to me from the time that I was a child.
I had to let go of a lot of ways of seeing myself and the world around me. There was great freedom found in letting go. Of course freedom is never free. I had to accept responsibility for my life and learn to try new things and get out of my comfort zone. Sadly, even misery can become comfortable to a person after enough time.
I worked hard on myself to lose weight. Discovering what I had about the cult that I had unwittingly become involved in as a child led me to the realization that knowledge is power. I got an app to track my calories and was shocked at how much I was eating. I just didn’t know, and that’s okay. Once I knew then I could start working on it. I lost 50 pounds.
Then I turned my attention to our debt. We were in $58,000 worth of debt to the IRS. In 18 months my wife and I worked like machines, often 7 days per week, at one point 34 straight days. We were self-employed and we just took any work that came our way even if it wasn’t our specialty and we made it all happen. At the end of that period of time we looked up and we had made not only the $58k but the taxes that would be owed on top of that money too, roughly $80k total. The good thing about working all of the time is that you have no time to spend money.
The most massive change came when we left the cult, refusing to stand for what it meant anymore. Talk about a plot twist. That’s something that we never saw coming until we got healthy mentally and emotionally and then we could no longer tolerate the toxic environment. Since then we have celebrated holidays for the first time, we have more friends than we can keep up with and they’re all those evil “worldly” people, and we have tried so many new things. I started telling my story through podcasts and then other people wanted me to help them to tell theirs. I became a certified life coach, I lead support groups, and my story is now what I want it to be and evolving all along as I grow.
What can I do for you?
What is your story? Is it reflective of what you want now, or are you repeating stories and roles picked up in the past? Let’s work on your story together.