Step Into Your True Story

I often say in the therapy room that learning to believe what is true about you can feel like waking up from a bad dream, or like stepping out of a story that was never true.

We create stories based on our own interpretations of what happened to us, or what didn’t. What people said to us, or didn’t. Based on how we were treated or ignored. And often those stories contain false beliefs. 

The reasons for why we tell ourselves these stories matter because that’s where we often find the lies, and naming and replacing them is our door to freedom. I wonder what stories you believe about yourself—what story is it time to step out of?

I was visiting a church in Scotland many years ago. It was old and cold, with lofted ceilings, made of large grey stones and resting at the top of a very high hill. It was being used by a new young church. The grey walls were covered with colorful banners, but it still felt bleak. The color didn’t warm it up. I was told it had been a convent before, and I could feel its history in the thick walls.

I was waiting for the service to begin, and I was relieved as an introvert to be standing at the back of the old church by myself. I’d found a little spot there alone, and I started thinking about where I was and who I was, and what I was struggling with.

I was wrestling with the same fears I’d been wrestling with for as long as I could remember. Difficult experiences early in my childhood had left my young mind to conclude that there must be something wrong with me. I didn’t have the tools to process what had really happened. Believing I was to blame was my child’s mind’s way of understanding those experiences, and now as a young 20 something, I still hadn’t learned differently. 

This is what happens when we feel pain as children. We very often conclude that it's our own fault. I know this now as a therapist and I help people correct these false conclusions all the time. But of course, I didn’t know it then, and I hadn’t known it for years leading up to that moment. 

The fear that something was wrong with me haunted me, and the “something” took different shapes at different times.

But the lie had begun to unravel and I was in the early stages of learning it was just that: a lie fueled by anxiety. There was nothing wrong with me. I was, in fact, just ordinary and flawed and lovely like everyone else—not shameful as I had always feared I was.

As I stood there thinking, my eyes wandered to an open door, and I was drawn by the bright light from outside streaming in to the grey church. It felt like an invitation.

My eyes kept going back to the door, this way out of the cold room I was in. The door was smaller than doors are built now, revealing its age. It looked carved out of the stone. I walked towards it, the bright cloud-covered Scottish sunlight calling me towards it. 

I felt deep in my heart and mind, an invitation walk to out of what I had been fearing and suffering in my anxieties. And the invitation was to walk through the door, from the dark old false story inside, to the beautiful light and truth outside. To finally believe what was true about me.

I hesitated for a moment, still in the grip of my anxiety. 

Sure, it was in my mind, but this felt like an invitation to take a step. To choose life, and to stop allowing myself to be tossed back and forth about who I am.

And then I accepted the invitation. I walked through that stone door out of the grey and into the light. It was a step, a commitment, a prayer, a symbolic moment for me, an answer to an invitation to love myself, to believe what is true about me. 

I stepped down a big stone step into a formal garden, onto a firm and rocky ground. It was cold and warm and bright all at once out there; it was beautiful. I took a huge breath, and the air was crisp and cold. I and looked up. The sky was huge, unending, full of so much more possibility than the church, so much more impressive than the dark inside had been. And I thought for the first time how silly it had been to believe in the dark, and how much more convincing the power of this beautiful light was. 

The clean air filled me up and I exhaled all the lies, and took in all the truth. And I promised myself that I would remember this quiet moment, this quiet invitation always. 

And I do. Often.

Whenever I get afraid now, I remember that invitation. I remember accepting the invitation to walk out of the cold damp church into the bright light of believing the truth. And that invitation stands today. For you and for me. 

I doubted myself one morning recently, in just a good old generic way, and I remembered that step I took years before out of that cold grey church into the bright Scottish daylight. I stepped off of the sidewalk onto the road. And I reminded myself to accept the invitation to believe the truth, to believe the light, and that it’s a commitment, a prayer, and a practice. 

We always have that invitation. To step out of the false story into the true story. It is always there for us. What is yours inviting you to believe? What dark story is it time for you to step out of, and into the light of truth?