Stacy carried a story for 40+ years: “My father didn’t care about me. I don’t matter.” This story shaped everything—her fierce independence, her reluctance to depend on anyone, her compartmentalization of emotions.
When she finally confronted her father, the story cracked open. He told her she always mattered. He told her things she did as a child changed his life. The narrative she’d built her entire identity around was incomplete.
“He said to me, ‘You’ve always mattered to me.’ And in fact there are some things that you did when you were a kid that helped me change my life for the better that I never knew about.”
We form our core stories as children with a child’s limited perspective. Then we spend decades living inside those stories without ever checking if they’re true. The wound was real—she did feel abandoned. But the meaning she assigned to it (“I don’t matter”) was a child’s interpretation, not the full picture.
Related Concepts
- Vulnerability produces love, not rejection
- External patterns mirror internal ones
- Doubt protects from unwanted emotions