If You Could Edit Yourself, What Would You Change?
- May 25
- 8 min read
Welcome to our new monthly newsletter, The Sacred Weaving, where we cultivate daily spiritual reflection. Whether you sit in ceremony or not, we hope these newsletters will be a helpful resource for deepening your presence with yourself, those around you, and the spiritual process that is constantly unfolding for you.
This newsletter is written by Sarah Beaudette, The Church of Gaia's Integration Director, and a writer and editor. She has trained in both Plant Medicine Integration and AyaSafety Harm Reduction at ICEERs.org. You can learn more about Sarah and her practice here. [Note: this post draws on my own experience as a survivor, researcher, and integration specialist, and does not necessarily reflect the views of The Church of Gaia]
There is a moment — maybe you know it — when the body does something the mind can't explain. A smell that overwhelms you with nausea. A panic attack in the middle of the workday. A relationship you keep choosing, no matter how many times you've promised yourself you wouldn't.
We tend to call these moments weakness. At best, we write them off as anomalies. But what if they are something far more precise? What if the body is not misfiring — but telling a story you’re not ready to hear?
So ... my colleague and I are writing a book about trauma. Said everyone ever, but here we are.
Why am I doing this, when Gabor Maté already has more followers than most indie pop stars, and if anything, the word “trauma” is overused to explain any negative feeling, just as the word narcissist is now applied to everyone’s ex?
Whenever an idea like trauma is so big that it transforms the world, the diversity of our personalities and life experiences means it needs to be understood through as many lenses as possible.
There’s one lens we aren’t using nearly enough, and it’s so powerful that yes, it deserves an entire book.
Trauma is just a story you keep telling. If you can’t let go of your suffering, you’re not necessarily doing anything wrong. You just haven’t found where your story lives yet.
Sometimes you’re at least vaguely aware of the story, and you know it’s no longer true, but you can’t find the source code to get in there and change it. Most of the time, we live our stories like objective realities.
When you have a big ceremony, or a mystical experience, or a retreat weekend, or a therapy breakthrough, what actually changes? How can you take advantage of it, without letting it slip away?
For one, by realizing that in your biggest transformational moments, it’s your story that’s changing. And when you go home, or you start to slip back into your old patterns, it means there are still pieces of your old story that need to be located before you can edit them. Your stories don’t just live in your head. If they did, they'd be a lot easier to change.
You are made of stories your mind and body started telling about the world before words even came into the picture, when you were all sensation and no memory. Deeper than this, you are made of stories your ancestors lived, some of which are encoded epigenetically in your DNA.
We Begin Writing Before We Have Words
Long before you could speak, your nervous system was already keeping records.
Within weeks of birth, an infant reads the world through the dilation of a caregiver's pupils, the rhythm of a heartbeat during skin-to-skin contact, the microsecond between a cry and a response. Neuroscientist Daniel Siegel calls this "experience-dependent wiring": neurons that fire together in moments of relief wire together, paving the path for the brain's first story. Not a story told in sentences — a story told in the language of the body.
I am heard. The world responds. I am safe.
Or, for many of us: I am alone. The world is unpredictable. I must manage this myself.
These are not thoughts. They are the biological architecture beneath every thought you will ever have.
Psychiatrist Thomas Lewis describes the wordless communication between infant and caregiver as limbic resonance, a biological symphony in which the infant absorbs the caregiver's emotional state so completely that it becomes the template for their own nervous system. The child is not just learning about love. The child is constructing the definition of love from raw materials.
If the raw material is chaos, the definition of love will include chaos. If the raw material is silence, the definition of love will include disappearing. If the raw material is earned approval, the definition of love will include performance.
The Stories We Don't Know We're Living
Developmental theorist Maria Montessori described the first six years of life as the stage of the "absorbent mind" — a period in which the child doesn't learn about their environment so much as become it. Not metaphorically. Neurologically.
This is why so many of our deepest stories are invisible to us. They were written before we had the alphabet to read them. They live not in memory but in instinct — in automatic reaching, reflexive shrinking, inexplicable loyalty to people and patterns that cost us dearly.
The woman who over-explains herself in every meeting. The man who disappears when intimacy deepens. The person who feels a stab of guilt the moment they rest. The addict who knows they are supposed to love themselves, but has no idea what that would feel like. These are not character flaws. They are chapters written in a language the conscious mind was never taught to read.
The work of healing, then, is learning to hold the lens out in front of us and look at it directly. To move the story from subject to object. To say: this happened to me, not this is me.
Why the Story Hides
If our bodies are such faithful witnesses, why is the conscious mind so often the last to know?
Because knowing, sometimes, is too dangerous.
For a child whose caregiver is also their threat, the brain performs a remarkable act of mercy: it hides the truth. Not because the truth isn't there, but because knowing the truth while remaining dependent on the source of harm would be psychologically catastrophic. It’s easier for a child to survive if she thinks I am the problem, than if she thinks my caregivers are abusive and there’s nothing I can do about it, or, my parents love me but they are really not equipped to be parents in some ways. The story goes underground. It lives in the body as a lifelong struggle with worth, a chronic medical condition, an addiction.
A panic attack. An autoimmune flare. A relationship that keeps ending the same way. These are the body's attempt to narrate a history the mind was never allowed to tell.
A landmark study by researcher Linda Williams followed 129 women who had documented hospital records of childhood sexual abuse. Interviewed seventeen years later, 38% had no conscious memory of the documented abuse. The story was true, life-altering, and completely unknown to the conscious mind.
The story doesn't disappear. It waits.
What Surfaces, and How
The movement from unknown story to conscious awareness rarely arrives as revelation. More often it comes as friction, when a familiar pattern becomes too costly to continue, or when we meet someone whose life shows us that a different story is possible.
For those who sit with plant spirits like ayahuasca, this surfacing can be sudden and total. The Default Mode Network — sometimes called the "inner critic," the narrator of the fixed self — temporarily quiets. What rushes in is not chaos, but data: images, sensations, emotions that were always there, waiting beneath the story we'd agreed to tell. The experience doesn't create new content. It grants access to what the body already knows.
But whether the door opens through ceremony, therapy, a trusted relationship, or just the exhaustion of living a traumatized story, what we find on the other side is always the same: not a broken self, but an adaptive one.
Every story we wrote was written to survive. Shame is the price your nervous system paid to keep you alive inside a system that required it.
Two Exercises for Reading Your Own Story
Exercise One: The Body's First Sentence
Find a quiet moment. Bring to mind a pattern you keep repeating — a kind of person you're drawn to, a way conflict tends to end, a feeling that follows you from one connection to the next.
Now move out of the mind and into the body. Where do you feel this pattern physically? A tightening in the chest? A drop in the stomach? Tension in the jaw?
Ask the sensation, without rushing: How old is this feeling?
Don't analyze. Just notice what arrives. For millennia, Western culture has crapped on ways of knowing that live outside the mind. One of the most important of these is the body's knowing through sensation and emotion rather than words.
For the next few days, pay attention to old memories that come up. You've stirred the pot, now watch for synchronicities, books, movies, and people who cross your path. Because our stories are as old as we are, revising them is a process and not an event.
A single therapeutic experience won't rewrite your stories for you, because that would rob you of catharsis. But you may be handed a pen and asked to revise your stories in daily life. Setting boundaries. Allowing people to have their feelings and choices without being responsible for them. Feeling abundant. Feeling self-compassion. Trusting the world. Giving others the benefit of the doubt, (or ending things earlier now that toxic patterns are clearer).
Exercise Two: Old Story / True Story
Take a piece of paper and draw a line vertically down the middle.
On the left, write a story you tell about yourself that causes you pain. It might be: I don't deserve rest. I always end up alone. I always disappoint myself and others. It's my fault so-and-so is unhappy.
On the right, write what you know — not what you feel, but what you know — about where that story came from. Who taught it to you? How old were you? What did you need to believe to survive what you were surviving?
Write as many examples as you can think of that disprove this old story. Like many parents, I feel a lot of guilt over my parenting mistakes and the times I'm too tired to be magical. Sometimes I actually have to list the ways I'm a good mom, because our old stories are designed to make us overlook the "often" and the "as much as I can" that are a lot more honest and compassionate.
Finally, write: This story made sense then. It kept me safe. It is not the truth of who I am.
You don't have to believe it yet. You only have to write it. The nervous system learns by repetition and by being witnessed.
Some people find it helpful to practice a tapping routine as they recite new affirmations, because tapping and other embodied practices access the nervous system, not just the mind. If you're not a tapping, energy-healy person, try thinking these positive thoughts while you're working out, or doing anything repetitive with your body.
The Story Is Not Over
What I have come to believe — through my own unraveling and the stories I have been trusted to hold — is that the scripts we carry are not evidence of damage. They are evidence of a nervous system so devoted to our survival that it wrote entire novels in the dark, without paper, without a reader, without rest.
The invitation is not to erase what was written. It is to finally read it. To bring it into the light where it can be seen, questioned, and — slowly, imperfectly, in the presence of those we trust — revised.
You are not broken. You are a story that has been waiting a very long time to be heard.
This post draws from research explored in depth in Judy Zeidel’s and my upcoming book, including the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Alice Miller, Linda Williams, Robert Kegan, Thomas Lewis, Daniel Siegel, Gabor Maté, and Barnett Pearce. Learn more about Sarah at deeperintegration.com.
