Can You Change Your Story?

Is it possible to change your story? Can we erase all the experiences, especially the trauma, that have shaped who we are? Listen in and see!

Overlay text and a turquoise color block with a woman in a pink shirt smiling

How we think about food and our health starts with the experiences we had growing up. But some of those no longer serve us and who we are today, it's especially hard to work through past trauma. Emily Marquis talks about how we can make a change and use it to better our wellness.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Emily is a Clinical Health and Wellness Coach, board certified NBC-HWC. She is an RYT200 Yoga Instructor and Mindfulness Consultant. She works with individuals and groups in support of creating healthy habits for sustainable lifestyle change.

Drawing from her professional training and personal health challenges; she has experience in preventing, reducing, and managing chronic illness from stress to sleep to weight loss to work life balance.

With her combined coaching and corporate HR background, Emily works with organizations in creating cultures of wellness and is NAHU certified. Emily also works with clinics and fellow practitioners to create a village for clients to best support their well-being.

She is an Instructor at Emory University in their graduate Coaching certificate program. Emily lives in Colorado, USA with her family and loves the balance between a good TV show and an outdoor adventure.

Grab her FREE 7 Day Gratitude Challenge here!

And you can also grab her FREE health Quiz here!

Our Personal Stories

Stories can be a sentence, a whole experience and even an identity we attach to. These can affect how we live, the decisions we make.

We are an onion and make of layers that create the human we are today. We experience and tell ourselves things that can pave our future and decisions.

We have both narratives about ourselves and those for others. We even have stories about situations. These form biases that integrate into our every day life.

Sometimes we can pin point where our stories came from, but other times we don't know.

Making sure that the stories we created serve us and our goals is important. Even as parent we want to be an example for our own kid's narratives.

The Meaning of Changing Your Story

When our stories do not benefit us, we can change them. This means that we can make the stories that do not serve us weaker and eventually replace them with new stories that benefit us positively.

The pathways from our negative stories have been created since birth and the more we say things to ourselves they get deeper and stronger. Then they affect every part of our lives.

Neuroplasticity (the ability for the brain to form new connections) tells us that our brain is soft and flexible, which gives us the ability to change our thoughts and behaviors.

The Science Behind Our Personal Narratives

The brain has trillions of connections. When you have a narrative, there is a pathway for it. This is how your command center works.

Your repetitive thought have strong connections because the more you repeat something to yourself, the stronger it gets.

You can even make connections between things like a type of food and a physical symptom. Perhaps you had a bad experience once with something, and when you see it that memory comes back. Making that connection stronger every time.

The less you use the pathway, the weaker it gets. Therefore, by changing the thought you can focus on the pathway you are trying to strengthen.

This is like getting better at sports the more you practice. It's the same for your thoughts. Our brain is so powerful and has so much impact.

Personal Narrative and Trauma

Stories and narratives can have deep impact in fighting and healing. Trauma is trauma, but it's what you do after that matters.

Science is showing that we can battle trauma and even relieve physical symptoms by changing the way we think and talk about our experiences.

This shifting of our story has a great impact in our recovery and life after trauma.

How to Change Your Story

There are so many benefits to changing our negative narratives.

It doesn't happen over night, it can take time and you need to be patient to see results.

Here are some steps that can help you change your story:

Awareness. Recognizing you have the stories in the first place. Listen to what is popping into your head or coming out of your mouths.
As yourself, where did it come from? Sometimes you will know but sometimes you won't.
Ask yourself, is it true? What would you like the truth to be? Sometimes we tell ourselves things that are not even true.
Ask yourself, what would you like to say to change it? This is where positive affirmations can come into play. You can shift focus from the positive to the negative.

Overall, science shows that we have control over what we want our stories to be. We are able to change our narratives to serve us positively if we are willing to put in the time and effort.

Don't forget to grab Emily's FREE 7 Day Gratitude Challenge and her FREE health Quiz!