155 Why Engaging Your Story Heals Your Brain

The Place We Find Ourselves

Adam Young

Hope, Christian, Christianity, Healing, Story, Trauma, Psychotherapy, Mental Health, Restoration, Heart, Sexualabuse, Health & Fitness, Adamyoung, Therapy, Attachment, Interpersonalneurobiology, Religion & Spirituality, Limbicsystem, Neuroscience

4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

My invitation to you today is simple: to take your story seriously. Engaging your story is the single most important thing you can do to experience healing. When I say "your story," I'm talking more about the individual scenes than the overarching narrative of your life. Your stories—particularly your stories of heartache or harm—have shaped your brain more than anything else. Which means that your past stories are shaping your present life more than you may realize. To support the podcast financially, click here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the place we find ourselves podcast. I'm Adam Young and today's
0:06.4	episode is focused on why you need to engage your story in order for your brain to heal.
0:14.8	And I want to begin today by sharing some of my personal journey
0:19.0	in coming to explore and address my own story.
0:22.2	It wasn't until I was about 35 years old that I was
0:26.2	introduced to the idea that I even had a story. Up until that time I would have
0:32.2	told you that I had some memories.
0:34.5	Up until that time I would have told you that I had some memories from my growing up years,
0:40.0	some of them good, some of them bad.
0:42.0	But none of the memories that I had registered as significant to me.
0:48.6	I didn't necessarily understand the stories, that is I couldn't make sense of the memories that I had, but it really didn't matter to me because I didn't feel like I needed to understand them.
1:01.0	They were just odd anecdotes, snippets of memory that really didn't have any bearing on my present life.
1:07.0	You probably also have similar snippets of memories, fragments, portions of stories that you remember.
1:16.2	There are pieces of your stories
1:18.5	that you likely remember, or you would soon
1:21.6	be able to, you know, if you flip through a photo album.
1:25.1	Perhaps you've dismissed most of the stories that you do remember as irrelevant to your present life, just like I did.
1:35.0	Rewind 15 years from age 35, mid 30s, to age 20.
1:40.6	I'm a student at the College of William and Mary and ever since I arrived at college I had been experiencing increasing levels of anxiety and depression.
1:52.0	In other words emotional pain, it just became a frequent
1:56.7	companion to me as I began college. And when it got severe enough, I would put my Bible and a journal in my backpack and I would ride my bike to a place called Lake Matocco, which was a secluded lake at the edge of the campus. I hiked into the woods, I found a private
2:16.1	spot, and I began what would become a very familiar endeavor. What was that endeavor? I would veraciously read the Bible desperately looking for answers to questions such as, if Jesus loves me, why do I feel so much pain so often?
	...

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