LIVING STORY
Juliet Bruce, PhD
Perhaps you identify:
By nature, you are passionate, compassionate, spiritually conscious, and creative. You are a healer, teacher, coach, writer, actor, artist, musician, mindfulness meditator, housewife, or activist who wants to live a meaningful life. Whether you work for a company or are self-employed, you see fresh solutions to old problems. You may find yourself at odds with the status quo in your world or feel that you have to tamp down your capacities to avoid rejection.
Now you are faced with reshaping your own life as the result of illness, traumatic experience, a death, breakup of a relationship, job loss, or awakening to the fact that you are not expressing your natural gifts.
Not so easy. Our ego will do anything to cling to the familiarity of our old life, even if it doesn't serve us well.
Your big challenge is that you have come to the edge of the life you've lived and don't know how to move forward, since in our society there is no school, no cultural model, and no success formula for authenticity.
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Is your current story something like this?
~ You've worked happily for an agency until new management took it over. Now the environment is so toxic that people are unable to do their work. You come home depressed and dispirited. You're trying to decide whether to stick it out with therapy while looking for another job, quit immediately and start your own consulting business, or borrow some money and go on a long trip to rethink your life.
~ You've survived a couple of bouts of cancer and are trying to find a new "normal" that doesn't assume happily ever after.
~ You're a talented writer who has become totally stuck on your present novel, and you realize that you're terrified of finishing it, as that would mean putting it out there in the literary marketplace -- becoming visible, your greatest fear.
~ You're caring for an elderly parent and feel your own spirit and dreams falling away. This isn't a job you can quit, but you can't take any more of it either. You feel like you're dying inside. You don't know what to do.
~ Your life is diminished and you're not fulfilling your potential due to frozen emotional pain from past or buried trauma. You're unable to access it in traditional therapy, and other expressive or holistic modalities leave you still with a story untold.
These are just a few of the dramatic thresholds that can break us or propel us onto a different and happier path. For these pivotal experiences to move us forward, we have to pull ourselves out of the energy of habit and learn to see ourselves in a new way. And most difficult for many, we must take steps forward into an unknown future -- without any guarantees.
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We live the stories we tell ourselves. You can make yours a good one.
I help my clients apply storytelling techniques to integrate and reframe the past, more deeply understand the present, and manifest a happier future. Stories are metaphorical journeys of transformation, and they can provide scripts for successfully navigating the varieties of change life presents us. Through story you can find meaning in past experience, coherence in present circumstances, and a scaffold for future action that will bring about positive change in situations that may seem intractable.
Once you realize that your life is an
unfolding story and that you are the storyteller with the power to change it, you are transformed
from a victim of circumstances into creator of your life. Being able to tell your story to receptive others helps you create healing connections that you need so very much at this time.
As your relationship to your problems changes, circumstances will follow. Your natural
powers of intuition and resilience will be ignited. Things you never thought possible will begin to happen.
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Writing your story will help you:
~ Embrace your life exactly as it is and find new dimensions and dynamics in your circumstances;
~ Strengthen your witnessing consciousness and provide a big-picture view of the situation beyond your own story;
~ Safely release toxic emotions associated with the stress, anxiety, and depression of loss and transition;
~ Experience the magic of coming to know yourself in a brilliant new way;
~ Walk full-voiced and confident in the world, knowing how to use your gifts and experience to help others.
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Does recasting your difficulties as a call to self-discovery and growth resonate or intrigue you?
Would you like to learn more? The following pages have general information about how my story practice works and the services I offer in-person and online.
If you want to take a free, no-strings action forward on your path of light, contact me to schedule a chat via phone or Skype. Let's explore the subtext of your life and how, together, we can galvanize the clarity, coherence, and sense of connection you need to move forward in truth and power.