Discernment In Sharing Your Story

Something I learned from my own therapist a while ago has stayed with me ever since. When you're in the middle of something big, let it be yours for a while.

Let it feel. Let it land in your body, before you bring it to anyone else.

A big experience, a big revelation, a big realisation, these moments are precious, and more fragile than we usually realise. The instinct, when something big lands, is to reach for someone straight away, to make sense of it through another person's eyes before we've even sat with it through our own. I understand that instinct. Connection is how a lot of us regulate, how we know something actually happened. But there's a cost to skipping the step of being with it alone first.

When you let something land with you fully before handing it to anyone else, you get to understand it on your own terms.

How do you actually feel about it.

What does your gut say, before the overthinking starts.

What does your body say, where does it sit, does it feel tight or open, heavy or light.

That's how you anchor into your own perspective, before someone else's gets layered over the top of it, sometimes so quickly you can no longer tell which feelings were yours and which ones you absorbed from how they responded.

This is also where it's worth listening to yourself.

Notice if the story changes depending on who you're telling it to.

Do the words shift, does the emphasis move, does the ending land differently with one person than another.

If it does, get curious about that rather than letting it happen unnoticed.

What is it about this particular gaze that makes you adjust the story. Are you protecting them, or protecting yourself. Are you trying to be believed, or understood, or comforted, in a way that only this version can get you. The shape your story takes in front of different people often tells you more about what you actually need than the story itself does.

This isn't about secrecy.

Discernment doesn't mean telling no one, it means choosing wisely who you bring your tender, unfinished things to, especially when what you're holding is sensitive, or still actively forming inside you.

I see this most clearly with clients moving through a big break up, because that particular wound gets told and retold so many times, to so many people, in such a short space of time. How many times you open that wound, and with whom, matters.

Every retelling asks something of you.

Choose wisely who earns that, or can hold you in that.

Ask yourself, if I share this with this person, is it going to be connective, or is it going to drain me. I always think of it as the aftertaste of a connection. Long after the conversation has ended, what does it leave behind. Does it sit well, the way a good meal does, or does it linger uncomfortably, the way certain conversations do when we've been met with someone else's panic or fixing instead of simple, steady presence.

This matters most when you're already in a vulnerable state, because vulnerability is porous.

It takes in whatever it's given.

That's discernment.

Not silence, just care, about who gets access to the parts of you that are still becoming. And grace, for yourself to take time in find the way it lands, just for you.

With love,

Narla