Anger Stories, Negative Emotions, and Rattlesnakes

Our memories are built on stories. Unfortunately, some of our stories are "anger stories," and in them is a very unhealthy share of negative emotion.

If you were unfairly treated by someone else, or bullied or abused--- if they did things that made you angry, if you felt ignored or oppressed in some way, and you tell that story and the anger is present in the story, guess what it does to the person who offended you? Nothing. It doesn't make them "un-offend" you. If they are still living, it's unlikely to make them run to you and say, "Hey, I just had a feeling I should apologize for bullying you in second grade. By the way, I don't remember who you are anymore, and I live in another state." If they're not living, you certainly can't change anything about their current state. You can't go back and say, "You need to make this 'un-happen.'. You made me really angry. You made me really sad. You made me feel unloved, rejected, ignored, mistreated"--- fill in the blanks. 

Harboring and telling "anger stories" is like reaching into a bag full of rattlesnakes. All of the poison gets injected into you as you retell the story. You replenish the poison, and you put the snake back in the bag--- this time a little fatter and a little more poisonous than it was the last time, and round and round and round it goes.

I'll help you change the stories.

Go to natewalkercoaching.com, and on the Contact page, comment on what would be most useful. Talk to me about this podcast and what you would like to hear. Share this with friends and loved ones. Reach out to me if I can help you with NLP or coaching or any other thing. 

Transcript

0:16

Hello my friends. How do you feel about rattlesnakes? I know that's really an odd question, but we're going to talk about rattlesnakes in a few minutes in a way that you probably have not thought of it before. I had an experience with a client the other day that I thought would prove helpful for you to know. With permission, I will share some of the conversation that we had, but let me preface that by setting this up a little bit, so you know what it is that we're talking about and why it will be helpful to you. In previous episodes, I've mentioned that we don't really store memories as a historical record In our minds. That's not how our brain works. It's not what it does. When we experience something, there's always a narrative or a story that we create in that moment. I can't store an experience exactly. I can't store it in three dimensions. I can't store it exactly the way it happened. What happens is that I have an experience and immediately and instantaneously construct a narrative, or a story, about what's happening, or about what just happened. That story gets stored as the memory of the experience. Because we store stories, we tend to reach back in time, or reach back into our brain, and pull them out every once in a while and reexamine them. The thing is, every time you go back and pull out a story, one that we call a memory, there will be some loss. There will be some things that don't get remembered. There will be elements of the story that aren't retrieved. You've got a lot of stuff rolling around in there. Well, I know a few people with nothing rolling around in there, but most people, inside their heads, have a lot of stuff rolling around, and when you reach back in and retrieve that memory, you may miss a few things. And so we fill in the gaps. When we remember, we fill in the gaps in the story, and then we put the story away after it's been retold. But this new version is slightly different from the last one, and the last one wasn't really a complete and totally accurate representation of what happened. Can you see that over time these stories change a little bit? Sometimes dramatically so, and sometimes not so much, but they change. Every time you reach for and retell that story, the story changes. Now, if you're dealing with something negative, something frightening, something sad, something that makes you angry; every time you retrieve that story, you tell a new one. And it has been my experience that those with whom I work tend to enhance those stories to add a little bit more anger--- almost as though you were retrieving some leftovers and adding some additional salt, and maybe a little Tabasco to make it hotter. Every time you do that, the emotion associated with it grows. If you are constantly retrieving memories that make you angry, or stories about something that happened to you that wasn't fair, or the way you were bullied, or the time you remember being very, very sad, you tend to add a little bit of weight to those emotions. Negative emotions, poison our bodies and our minds and our memories and our relationships. One of the reasons I chose to help people using NLP is because I can help them release the negative emotions that they're carrying around--- some for decades. Once those are released, you have a big, open, empty space. Now, back to the Rattlesnake story. When we're dealing with negative stories, especially--- and you may call them memories, and you may say,"yeah, but it-- that's exactly how it happened." Sure, it is. There is no way that that's exactly how it happened. It doesn't mean you're being dishonest. It's just, that's not how our minds work. There's going to be some variance from actuality in that experience. Every time you go back and think of that negative experience--- we'll take anger as an example--- every time you go back and retrieve one of those angry stories, we'll call them, and retell the angry story, the anger grows. It's poisonous to you. It would be the same as having a large bag or a box full of rattlesnakes, and saying,"I'm going to go back into that poisonous experience. I'm going to go retrieve one of those rattlesnakes." So you reach your arm in the bag, you pull out a rattlesnake, and you tell the story again. The poison is injected into you. The poison does not make the story"un-happen." If you were unfairly treated by someone else, or bullied or abused--- if they did things that made you angry, if you felt ignored or oppressed in some way, and you tell that story and the anger is present in the story, guess what it does to the person who offended you? Nothing. It doesn't make them"un-offend" you. If they are still living, it's unlikely to make them run to you and say,"Hey, I just had a feeling I should apologize for bullying you in second grade. By the way, I don't remember who you are anymore, and I live in another state." If they're not living, you certainly can't change anything about their current state. You can't go back and say,"You need to make this'un-happen.'. You made me really angry. You made me really sad. You made me feel unloved, rejected, ignored, mistreated"--- fill in the blanks. When you reach into that bag full of rattlesnakes, all of the poison gets injected into you, and you retell the story. You replenish the poison, and you put the snake back in the bag--- this time a little fatter and a little more poisonous than it was the last time, and round and round and round it goes. The client with whom I was working the other day--- and I hate saying the word client because that kind of doesn't feel right. When I end up working with someone, whether we're talking about long-term coaching, or in a photo shoot--- I'm also a photographer, so some of my clients are photography clients--- but when I'm working with somebody in NLP, especially; when I'm helping get rid of the negative emotions that have just stymied them, or hurt them, or prevented them from moving forward for sometimes decades, it doesn't feel like a client relationship. It feels like... family. It feels like a close friend. It feels like someone I love and would do anything to help. That's always what it feels like. Now some are people that I've known for a while and they become clients, and some are people that I just barely met, and they become friends. So, for the rest of the story, I'm gonna say,"the friend with whom I was working." The friend with whom I was working, had had a number of experiences that just filled her with anger--- so much so that it was visible from the outside simply by looking at body language. I dearly wanted to help my friend. There was a lot of suffering, and it was time to end the suffering. There's no reason to carry around those bags of poisonous snakes any longer. But we had a hard time releasing anger. In fact, it took more time than just about anybody I've ever worked with. The reason was; during the exercises that I use to help that emotion release, one of the things that we do is visualize being as though we were up in the air above what I call those"anger events"--- above something that happened, that produced anger, or hurt or sadness. Every single time we would get to that position, as I was walking my friend through the exercise, the following phrase would come up:"Did I ever tell you about..." followed by a story that made my friend angry and justifiably so--- but every time the story was retold, it was with a little more anger, a little more frustration, a little more disbelief in the ability to change anything about her future. That's what a bag of rattlesnakes does. Those things couldn't be released because every single time we got to a vantage point from where she might have been able to let go of the anger, she would dive right back into the experience, and by her language, I could tell that she was actually reliving it. But the story would get stronger. And then we'd come to another one and she'd relive it, and the story would get stronger, and so on and so on and so on. This happened several times. Finally, I stopped the exercise and recommended something I'm going to ask all of you to do, sort of ahead of time, as though you are about to release all these emotions. I said,"When these emotions release, you will feel as though you're staring at a huge, beautiful, well lit, but empty room. For all these years the"furniture" in your memory--- the things that you pull up when you picture a story--- have filled this room. All of the furniture in that space was anger stories. Those are going to be gone, and you'll have a big, beautiful, well-lit space and you'll need to refurnish it. What are you going to put in there? She thought about that for a long time. When we have negative stories taking up space, it can be very uncomfortable to be rid of them. That big open space feels a little unfamiliar. Actually, it feels a lot unfamiliar. It's daunting to some. One of the reasons that people go back to harmful situations is simply because it's familiar. We're afraid of change. We're afraid of the unfamiliar. So it took a while, with a little prodding and a little prompting and a little help, to help her figure out what she would fill that space with. Passions, opportunities, experiences, new knowledge, new friendships, filled an entire page. It was fantastic. And then I asked her the question:"Are you willing to give up all of the anger for all of this?" That time the answer was yes, with a big smile. Anger stories, sadness, stories, stories where we explain how we were wronged, how we were maligned, how we were let go, how we were not treated the way we should have been treated--- all of those stories, take up space. They fill a big, dark space full of rattlesnakes. Get rid of'em. They're not worth what you can put in their place. What you can put in their place is beautiful. It's powerful. It includes opportunities that you hadn't thought of, learning that you couldn't have learned, passions that you may not have even recognized, and so on. You want that big, empty space, even if it feels a little awkward at first. You want to fill it with something beautiful. And so then I asked my friend the question, and I will ask you the same. Which would you prefer? Continuing to dip your arm in a bag of rattlesnakes, or a big, open, beautiful space that you can fill with anything you want?,When you go back in your mind to the past, would you rather retrieve something poisonous, dangerous, and ugly? Or would you rather fill a beautiful, open space with anything you want, anything you desire, every opportunity that you thought might not be possible because you couldn't see it? Negative emotions obscure opportunities. Negative emotions poison relationships. Negative emotions, poison your body, your mind, and your future.

Nathan: 13:30

To avoid the rattlesnakes and really, truly, get rid of all that angry clutter, all the anger stories that are taking up space, and that poison the good things in your life, you must be willing to get rid of the stories. That means you let them go and you don't tell them anymore. Now that can be pretty hard if you're a good storyteller. Some of those things are really fun stories to tell. Don't tell them. Instead, focus your stories and your attention on a bright future to come, and on all of the good things that are a part of your life. Drop the bag of snakes. Find somebody who can help you do it. If I'm that person, go to natewalkercoaching.com and on the contact page, down in the comments area, tell me that you want some help, and we'll talk about how I can help you best. That conversation, of course, will cost you nothing. You can have a future that you've not been able to imagine. You can have a future brighter than anything you have imagined thus far, once you get rid of the dark room full of anger, full of sadness, full of fear, and full of poison. Rattlesnakes are not your friends. Clutter is not your friend, but happiness is the object and design of your very existence, and I want to help you get there. We'll talk again soon.