Telling Harsh Stories to Yourself About Yourself? How To Rewrite the Narrative. | Allison Sweet Grant

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody, how are we doing? I suspect we all have brutal stories that we tell about ourselves to ourselves. Mine has often been that I'm incredibly selfish, maybe even irredeemably rotten, but for you the story might be that you're a fraud, an imposter, a failure, unworthy, not smart enough, not outgoing enough, unlovable.

Maybe you're haunted by shame or by addiction. I could go on, the menu is vast. Today I'm going to talk to a living example of the possibility of rewriting your narrative. Alison Sweetgrant is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, turned author. Her newish novel is called I Am the Cage.

It's loosely based on her own childhood experiences, which were quite brutal and which she will describe for you. In this conversation, we talk about the impact of your childhood trauma on your adult relationships. The concept of a junk drawer, that's a metaphor for all of the pain and self-doubt and anxiety that you might try to compartmentalize in a junk drawer. We talk about writing as a tool for self-acceptance, how to rewrite your own story and where to start, practical meditation tools to quiet the mind, the role of cathartic visualization dealing with imposter syndrome, and much more. Just a quick mention before we dive in that our next live meditation and Q<unk>A session will be this Tuesday, October 21st at 4 Eastern.

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