Telling your story is important for so many reasons. Putting an experience into words is a great exercise in choosing the facts and feelings that are most important to remember. Being witnessed or heard validates the experience as having an effect on you. Telling personal narratives and having an audience is a way for others to relate to your experience; to remind us that we share a lot with others. We also tell ourselves stories that are not necessarily true but are familiar.\u00a0 We often provide excuses or justifications for not doing something, like not going to a party because you won\u2019t know anyone there. Think of a situation when you were invited to something and created excuses why you couldn\u2019t go but eventually guided yourself past your \u201cstory,\u201d past habitual excuses. What got you past the familiar and what might this say about what you\u2019re grateful for?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…Telling your story is important for so many reasons…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-identifying-gratitude","category-tip"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n