How To Rewrite Your Story, Make Peace with the Past, and Break Old Patterns | Melissa Febos

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, how are we doing, everybody? One of the most potent sources of human suffering is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Sometimes these stories are damning and demeaning, you know, I'm a bad person, I'm gross, I'm unworthy, whatever. Sometimes they're self-aggrandizing or victim-oriented. Why does bad stuff always happen to me? But the good news is you can learn how to revise and upgrade the stories you tell yourself. In other words, you can change.

And today we're going to talk to somebody who has a playbook for doing this and has run this playbook many times in her own life to great success. Melissa Phoebos is a professor at the University of Iowa and a renowned memoirist who has written several books, including Body Work and the Dry Season. We talk about how to audit your personal narrative with some simple questions, her five-step method for rewriting unhelpful stories. why community and vulnerability are required for real change, in other words, why it's much harder to do this work alone. And we talk about Melissa's own experiences running this playbook, as I said earlier, with regard to her relationships and her addictions.

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