Juicing Our Dramas

Let’s not juice our dramas. By that I mean telling and retelling the stories, large and small, in which we are life’s victim. You know the kind I mean: when the cable guy is supposed to come in a four hour time frame and shows up two hours beyond that: when we stand in an endless queue at the DMV and finally achieve the window only to be told that we haven’t brought all of the necessary papers. All that boring, stupid stuff that happens to us all the time when life, as is so often the case, fails to work for us the way we want it to.

Sometimes—at least in hindsight--it’s funny when things don’t work. We rather enjoy it because, for example, our friends have their DMV stories, too, and, together, we can dump all over that hopeless office and bond through our mutual frustration.

Some of our dramas are serious: a loved one receives a cancer diagnosis: a friend breaks a hip. We yearn for a sympathetic ear, perhaps a shoulder to cry on. These situations merit our attention.

 But most of our dramas arise out of the way we choose to perceive and describe every-day events in our lives. Our attitude and descriptive language make a big difference. I have a friend in the UK who, when her housekeeper for the summer fails to properly plump up the pillows in the living room, my friend will say, “It’s a nightmare!”

 No!  A nightmare is when one of our children is diagnosed with leukemia. Our ordinary life dramas are at the most, annoying or irritating and inconvenient. 

We can notice our drama-junkie behavior when we need to tell our victim version story repeatedly to almost any willing audience. That’s when we know we are hooked. That’s when it is time to relax, take some deep breaths and let it go.

Why does this matter? Why should we bother to become aware of this attention-seeking pattern? Because every time we repeat our drama stories we are, to some degree, reliving them and therefore refreshing the original anxiety or anger the experience generated in our bodies.

According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breaking Your Habit Of Being Yourself: How To Lose Your Mind and Create A New One, our bodies are unable discriminate between thought alone and the actual experience. Therefore thought—stories about the experience--brings on the same stress as the primary experience itself. And, as we all know, stress is not good for our health.

Do we really want to incorporate this victim story, along with all the others we have juiced over the years?

The next time we have a “poor me” or “a dreadful situation” story to tell, let’s tell it once, maybe a second time, but then? Ahhhh. . . . Could we just skip it?