Changing Your Story

Living with chronic pain, trauma, grief, anxiety, or depression can leave you feeling stuck.
You struggle every day, and no matter how much you want things to be different, you can’t seem to move forward.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) gently challenges this struggle. It invites us to acknowledge that there are some things we cannot change — while also recognising that they don’t need to control or dominate our lives. Instead, we can begin taking small, meaningful steps toward the lives we want to be living.

And in doing so, we begin a new chapter.

But this is where many of us get hooked.

We tell ourselves that we can’t start the next chapter until we’ve fixed, healed, or rewritten the first one. That once the pain is gone, the trauma resolved, or the grief softened, then we’ll allow ourselves to move forward.

Most of us have watched Disney or Pixar movies at some point in our lives. Almost every story begins with loss or trauma — the death of a loved one, abandonment, betrayal, danger. This opening chapter sets the scene. It’s what makes us root for the main character.

(And if you haven’t figured it out yet — you are the main character in your story.)

But the movie doesn’t stay stuck in chapter one.

When we’re hooked by pain or trauma, we keep trying to rewrite that opening chapter over and over again, hoping that if we can just change the beginning, the suffering will finally stop. But it doesn’t. The struggle only keeps us stuck.

ACT invites us to do something different: to gently unhook and begin writing chapter two.

And chapter two doesn’t start when pain disappears.
It starts when we take the smallest step toward what matters to us — toward connection, purpose, meaning, or kindness — even with pain along for the ride.

I can’t wait to read what happens next….

 By Dr Michelle Beukes-King (thanks JS for the inspiration)