Here are some quotes from The Velveteen Rabit before we begin. This experience, reading, or listening, is yours to have. I invite you to notice where these quotes land in you and we will begin our story and end up somewhere REAL inside you.
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When [someone] loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real. Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
“He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.”
Once upon a time there was a soul. It was floating around in the soulful place, and it felt a tug. This tug was from Purpose; it was calling the soul to find a body to do something with. The soul was intrigued about this idea. It floated to the Tree of Knowledge and learned that it would have to give up its freedom and that being in a body would start out wonderful but get hard quickly. It would be completely dependent on others for a long time and the conditions could have its ups and downs. For the ups and downs it was allowed to leave its body but not for too long, that could damage the connection to it, and it might start to malfunction its purpose and get off track. The soul learned it could have emotional release and that other bodies might be able to learn about these releases and come to help but the soul would also have to learn language and communication eventually if that were to last and help the soul get it’s needs met.
The soul was not impulsive about the tugging Purpose. It considered things. It lay under the Tree of Knowledge and tried to feel it’s roots and sense the right decision. The Tree gave the soul early memories, whispers of things a voice was saying about its purpose. A female voice would say things, then another, and another and the soul started to realize it needed to pick one. Sometimes the connection was very weak because the voice was not entirely ready for a baby, or it was scared to make one, or it thought it might be broken somehow and wasn’t sure, or even things seemed to be very bad already in the family life or chaotic somehow. There were all sorts of voices, and the soul had to pick one. It learned it was not to pick an easy choice. Purpose told the soul, through the Tree of Knowledge, that it had to be a hard-won journey and to pick a voice that might challenge the soul’s integrity.
The soul closed its mind and only listened to Purpose for a while, letting it cast hopes and dreams, not worrying if they would get shattered and have to be reconfigured repeatedly. Once it felt adequately connected to Purpose again. It opened its ears very briefly and chose through a sense of internal knowing that it knew would leave the moment it had a body. It said goodbye to knowing and dove, waiting to be caught by a womb space. When the soul landed it became a listener and slept in this new dialogue. When it slipped out into the world, it felt unreal and hard immediately, but there were people there. It lost all its knowing then and learned to be real in a body. It is a very hard thing to be real in a body. Somehow, it would have to whisper to itself every day, “No matter who is around you, you have a purpose, learn to speak, learn to communicate, remember what you knew will come back to you”.
REALNESS
Allowing this story to come to me as something to actually share, felt too real to block it. I spent two decades training and studying, perfecting and providing, a form of listening that is what many consider the invitation to healing, therapy. However, there is so much more to healing emotional pain than talking about it. It is holistic and takes the mind, body and now I am sensing it takes story and creativity. The tools for healing became, 15 years in, a new layer to what it takes to heal, and that is you using them, however your own creativity, linking story to your soul’s purpose and the pain it takes to follow it, is beyond talking about who broke your heart, which parent created the most wounds, and what traumas breeched the boundaries of your trust and faith in love and connection being safe to pursue.
The Toolbox Approach, is a phases of healing approach. It offers three phases of healing called: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing. While this approach is in the process of registered trademarking, it is not because I seek to own it, it is because I seek it to be larger than myself. I have realized, it is my purpose to live the phases and share them. Is my soul the creator of this purpose and chose my life? It helps me REAL-ationaly heal to believe so. When I am hurting because the people in my life may be kicking up old wounds, I remember my soul chose this and learned this would happen and that it is bigger than me hurting. It helps me not by soldering on to use work as a numbing agent, giving as an outsourcing to my pain so I cannot feel it as much, or being some other version of me that proves pain can’t get to me. It helps me, because it is REAL. We don’t want to believe that our imaginations are real but they are. You remember what you imagine as possible even in a less reality-based life. That IS REAL!
We have to be careful, of course, with imagination. We can’t use it to pretend that job we are in, relationship we are in, or way we are behaving is better than it is. Still, there is a way to use the realness of imagination to be more of who you are. Reimagining Imagery in Memory, or RIM, is a therapeutic technique that can be used on traumatic memories or otherwise distressing memories, consciously or subconsciously held. Like with all the tools in The Toolbox Approach, however, I like to make them realistically usable for self-help and empower you to explore yourself and consider if you wanted to bring that exploration to therapy.
Re-Scripting (a self-help version of RIM)
To give more of a background, consider if you have ever replayed a painful memory from your past and let it define who you are today. Maybe you were targeted in some way and bullied at school, and now, years later, you still believe you’re defective or not good enough. Or perhaps you did something impulsive and made a mistake that continues to haunt you, shaping how you see yourself in ways that hold you back.
When we consider using imagination to re-script, like I did above with the concept of how we all got here, we challenge the accuracy of memories. What if they could be changed - not erased, but rewritten - in a way that you feel a freeing as you do it and that experience becomes a memory you hold on to, freeing you from a weight of some kind? That’s exactly what imagery re-scripting aims to do in this self-help version of it.
How Memories Shape Our Self-perception
The mental snapshots we hold about ourselves are shockingly as influential as our thoughts and emotions. For example, someone who was targeted and bullied as a child may not only remember the experience but also continue to see themselves as that ineffectual, disempowered, and fearful person. These images are there lingering and while not as sharp as the daily experience and dread from that time, they subtly reinforce negative self-beliefs, shaping how they perceive themselves today.
The idea that memories are not static snapshots of the past is supported by research with the use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). It shows us that memories are evolving narratives shaped by emotions and perceptions. When negative memories are particularly strong, they can fuel anxiety, depression, and social phobia by reinforcing harmful self-perceptions. This happened to me very recently, at can be quite familiar with family of origin emotional triggers. The memory is happening for you, no one else shares it because it is your perception. Triggers are painful because we are very much alone inside them. That is why we need to feel the tools in our own hands as our best support. I always say, “You are the safest adult you know when you're holding your tools!”.
It is so important to have a tool like re-scripting because the way we remember events is just as important as the events themselves. If your boss, brother, friend, or otherwise, is triggering distressing imagery unknowingly, you are alone with this, and it can be painful to communicate your pain when what you may need most is a way to process through it back to the present. If distressing images go unchallenged, they can become deeply ingrained in our core beliefs about who we are, our place in things, and how safe it is to be in our REALNESS.
What is Imagery Re-scripting?
Imagery re-scripting is a therapeutic technique designed to change the emotional impact of distressing memories. If you can be aware of what a trigger in the present is bringing up for you, you can link it to the memory at its source. The way to do this is to go back to the objective facts. For example, let’s say your plans with your partner get cancelled last minute because they were offered an important work opportunity and this is the second time this has occurred in three months. They expect you to be thrilled and you wanted to stay supportive, the first time you genuinely were, but now you are feeling left and less important and resent that it was expected you are fine with this. Eventually, you are fighting back anger and hurt and even feels some tears when on the phone call informing you of this. This is an emotional trigger. It does not mean your emotions got triggered by this present situation because it is an over-reaction to the present, it lies in your memory.
Finding the memory requires you to get horizontal on the floor or a yoga mat and start to slowly release your body. Let the floor hold you and gently feel into any discomfort and address it through lightly adjusting. You might pull one knee in tightly and feel the release in the lower back, placing it down again with an exhale may open one hip. Try just doing that on both sides and start to consider the objective facts. In the example, they are: 1. My partner has a work opportunity, 2. My partner has to cancel our plans, 3. My partner is excited, 4. This happened once before and we had to cancel. Now, the story that the internal world makes up about all this might be, “I can’t believe I trusted someone out to only advance their career, I am so stupid, this is like my mother and father all over again!”. That would indicate the unique disharmony inside you as you are triggered by this. As you lay there considering what memories this links to, you are perfectly primed to redirect and consider “do I want to imagine this differently and see if it helps?”. In re-scripting, instead of merely discussing a painful experience, individuals mentally revisit it, but with a new perspective.
Rather than erasing past events, this approach allows individuals to shift their relationship with a memory. Instead of feeling trapped in the role of a helpless victim, they can reimagine the experience in a way that brings them strength, validation, or support. Image rescripting is a concept that has been around a long time, but there have been various modern interpretations of how it can be used. The person largely accredited with creating the standard application for PTSD and C-PTSD is international trauma specialist Mervin Smucker PhD. One of the hardest things about PTSD or C-PTSD recovery is controlling involuntary images that come to mind at all times of the day and night, however even if you don’t have this condition, it can be very helpful.
So, below you are guided to find a new interpretation that makes the triggered memory, once you access it, less problematic. In effect, you mentally rescript that aspect of your life, just as you might physically rewrite a description of a memory or future expectation. By ‘recrafting’ it in a new way, you can feel greater control and gain a new perspective. So, as a guide, you can do three things:
Say to yourself “I am going to mentally re-script this”.
When this imagery or experience comes to your mind, what do you wish had happened?
How could it have a more comforting outcome? Could you intervene as you today? Could this become poetic or creative writing somehow?
This tool is very powerful; it’s for diving in deeply but I also promise you it feels great when you are deeply triggered to take back your personal power and your energy because triggers are draining. Often, you don’t need to figure out what anyone did to you, you need to feel yourself again, perhaps even your best self that wasn’t showing up in your life for quite a while. When you do feel better, you might realize it all just becomes a request of yourself for the future. What will you do next time someone lets you down? I find my best answer is, I WILL USE MY TOOLS!
As a parting word, the book “You Are Not Broken” is an introduction and invitation to one phase of healing called Narrative Healing. This book is like a ten-month pregnancy at this point! It took years to write it and despite thinking it would launch this summer, I am learning from my soul, PURPOSE TAKES PATIENCE! Please click on the author’s website and explore. Use the contact me to let me know you are interested in pre-order and book launch gatherings with live readings, signing and more. REALEASE DATE IS NOW! OCTOBER 7th, 2025!
Share this post