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How To Be In Charge Of Who You Are Becoming

If you want to feel more connected to yourself and more in charge of who you are becoming, we recommend three steps.

1. Review

2. Revise

3. Reframe

Reviewing gets you in touch with your experiences. It is the way to feel the feelings tied to your stories. When you take a close look at yourself and your thoughts, instead of avoiding them or just letting life happen, you are more fully engaged with what is you.

Revising is the way to let your past transform. You get to take part in this. You can’t change what happened but you can change the story you tell yourself. Revising doesn’t mean dismissing. Instead, you revise your past from alternate points of view to discover strengths and moments of clarity in difficult situations.

The purpose of reframing is to foster your becoming. Reframing provides a new window and allows you to move forward, with all that you’ve been, and evolve into someone new. The reframe gives you purpose and direction.

Here is a simplified example:

Lin never wanted to sit and look at the actual events of her life. She preferred to say “My life sucks, that’s why I drink and shop. It’s the way I get through.”

Over the years she avoided herself more and she felt worse.

Finally at 52, she decided she had to take charge.

“The script has gotten away from me and now I’m really a mess.”

So first we reviewed. For example, we looked at Lin’s childhood, when she felt frightened and alone. “It was painful to do, I felt a lot of emotions, but it was also a relief.”

Then we revised. “Look at how that girl was clever. She actually survived so much.”

Then we reframed. “I am not a mess. I am a woman who has always recreated herself.”

Now Lin doesn’t have to run from the past and she can look towards what’s next.

The truth is, by the time we reach our 50’s we have been incubating a whole new self within ourselves. We can’t let old stories keep her from coming through.

Your future self is waiting for you to imagine her and put her to work in the world.

Let’s let her out…

Podcast

Each week Dr. Cecilia Dintino and Psychotherapist Hannah Murray Starobin will speak with women who have twisted their plots and discovered that life after 50 can be filled with imagination, inspiration, laughter, and endless possibilities.

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