This content was created by Tim Arrigo. This content was uploaded by Tim Arrigo. This is a YouTube talk titled "The stories that you tell yourself become the stories that define yourself" (created 2023-07-24). It is a spoken monologue by Tim Arrigo in English about stress, the biology of fear, how negative narratives and unresolved past experiences create trauma, and the importance of changing one’s internal story to heal, manage emotions, and separate self-worth from past events.
Chapters
So many people don't realize that they could turn on stress with their own mind. They don't realize that they're putting their body in a state of fight or flight every single day, conditioning their body with the hormones of stress by just thinking about something in the future they can't control, or thinking about a past experience that has a negative story attached to it. See, when we have unresolved issues, the real problem isn't the, isn't the situation that happened. It's our relationship to it. You can never change what happened. You could only change the way you relate to it. And the way that we relate to it is the story that we tell ourselves about it. Because that story that we tell ourselves about it, that memory that we hold, has an emotional charge to it as well, right? When something happens and you believe that it's your fault, or something happens and you believe that you deserve it, or something happens and it creates a negative belief systems that become conditioned in you. So anytime you think about that experience, those belief systems surface, and those belief systems become right? A form of cognitive bias. Like you start seeing everything as a reflection of what you already believe about yourself. So when you have a negative emotion connected to a past experience, we can call that trauma. And when you have a— you have no emotion connected to a past experience, we call that wisdom. So how do we step into wisdom? By changing the story. By changing the way that you relate to the experience. That's how you heal from it. You heal from it by separating your worth and value from things that have happened to you, and you change your relationship to it by changing the narrative, changing the story. That's, that's the biology of fear. When you think about a fearful experience, it's like you trigger stress in your body, and people are doing this all day long. And I'm going to tell you right now, you only become self-destructive when you become impulsive. And you only become impulsive when you become reactive. And you only get reactive when you're stressed. And you only become stressed when you're not managing your emotions, when you're not managing your own mind. So don't allow stress to take a hold of you. And continue to take you back to somewhere that you don't want to be. Don't allow your past to show up in your life without your permission, without your consent, right? Do the work that you need to do on yourself so you can manage your own mind, manage the story, manage the narrative. Because at this point in time, the only thing that's still reoccurring and that you're still reliving is not the event itself. It's the story that you tell yourself about it and who you believe you are because of it.
