Breaking Up With Your Bullshit: How to Spot the Stories Running Your Life
We are deeply identified with our thoughts—so much so that it can be nearly impossible to see them as optional. Our beliefs feel like facts. In many ways, that makes sense: these narratives have been with us for so long, shaping the way we see ourselves, others, and the world around us. We cling tightly to them, often preferring to be right—even if being right keeps us stuck, small, or unhappy.
Our minds work in story. It’s how we create meaning, make sense of chaos, and predict outcomes. There’s no way around it—narrative is the framework through which we experience life. Some of those stories empower us. But others? Others limit us, reinforce outdated survival strategies, and quietly sabotage the very things we say we want.
The trick is: these stories usually run on autopilot. Most of us are so fused with them, we don’t even realize they’re stories. We assume they’re just… reality.
Understanding Your Stories
In psychology, these stories are known as cognitive schemas—mental frameworks shaped by repeated experiences, inherited family beliefs, cultural norms, and early emotional imprinting. Once formed, these schemas filter the way we interpret every new experience, subtly shaping our emotions, decisions, and behaviors in ways we rarely stop to question.
You might recognize versions of them:
“Success only comes through struggle. If it feels easy, I probably didn’t earn it.”
“I have to compromise who I am to be loved. If I show the full truth of myself, I’ll be rejected.”
“If I’m not constantly achieving, I have no value.”
“I don’t belong anywhere.”
Here’s the tricky part: these aren’t usually conscious thoughts running through your mind word-for-word. Rarely do we catch ourselves thinking “I have no value unless I’m achieving.” That’s what makes these stories so hard to spot. They live just beneath the surface, quietly driving behavior, shaping emotional reactions, and reinforcing patterns we don’t fully understand.
Over time, they solidify into core beliefs—so embedded that they start to feel like truth. And because the mind is wired for consistency, it constantly scans for evidence that proves these beliefs right, until they become invisible, unquestioned realities.
This is exactly why paying attention to patterns is so valuable. The repetitive nature of the pattern—where you keep ending up, how you keep feeling—often reveals the deeper belief driving it. What looks like “just the way things are” is often a spider web of interconnected thoughts, emotions, and behaviors rooted in a single, limiting story.
How to Identify Your Limiting Stories
Spotting your own stories is tricky—because they feel true. It’s confronting to realize that the foundation you’ve built your life on may not be as solid as it seemed. But it’s also liberating—because anything constructed can be dismantled.
I want to offer you a guide—but be gentle with yourself. This work often touches old survival strategies we developed in childhood. If you feel resistance or emotional overwhelm, it’s natural. Having the support of a skilled coach or therapist can help hold the emotional weight of dismantling these stories safely.
Start by looking at the places where you feel stuck: the areas of your life that generate frustration, resentment, or hopelessness on repeat.
Ask yourself:
Where do I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel—repeating the same pattern, no matter what I try?
What automatic meaning do I assign to challenges, failures, or setbacks?
When something doesn’t work out, what’s the first thing I make it mean about myself?
For example:
If relationships keep leaving you depleted, is there a story like “My value is in the way I take care of everyone else” running the show?
If you’re constantly burnt out, does “Rest is lazy. If I stop, everything will fall apart” sound familiar?
Start noticing where your strongest emotional reactions live—anger, shame, jealousy, grief. These emotions often are linked directly to an underlying story.
Why We Cling to the Stories
It’s important to remember: these beliefs weren’t created randomly. Most were formed for a reason—to protect us, help us survive, or make sense of the world when we were too young to know better.
Judging yourself harshly for having them only strengthens their grip. What helps is compassionate curiosity:
Where did I learn this?
How did this belief protect me once?
Am I still that person, living in that same environment? Or is it safe to set this down now?
Dr. Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion shows that this kind of inquiry is essential for lasting change. It’s not just about thinking differently—we also need to create the emotional safety to choose a new story.
Rewriting the Narrative
Identifying the story is powerful. But change comes when we also challenge it—when we stop taking it at face value and start asking if it’s still useful.
1. Cognitive Reframing: Make Space for Something New
Is this belief absolutely true—all the time?
What else could be true, based on who I am today—not who I was when this story formed?
What belief would serve the life I’m trying to create, not just the one I’ve survived?
For example, “I’m only valuable when I’m productive” might become “My value is inherent, not earned.”
2. Surround Yourself with Living Examples
Our brains are wired for modeling. Through the mechanism of mirror neurons, we absorb what we see around us. It's how we learn, expand, and update our sense of what’s possible.
If you’re carrying a story that says “Love always means losing myself” or “I can’t make money without burning out”—a powerful way to disrupt the narrative is to seek out living examples of the opposite.
There is always someone, somewhere, proving that a different reality exists. Seek them out. Watch how they operate. Watch what they normalize.
If your story says love requires self-abandonment, find couples who embody mutual respect, authenticity, and healthy interdependence. Study how they communicate, how they honor themselves and each other.
If your story says success demands sacrifice, seek examples of people thriving in ways that honor their health, energy, and creativity—whether that’s building passive income, working cyclically, or creating abundance without overextension.
Your brain needs these examples to create new neural pathways. It needs to see that the version of life you want isn’t a fantasy—it’s real, it’s embodied, and it’s available.
If it exists for someone else, it’s just as possible for you.
If that statement alone makes your body contract or your mind instantly reject it—pause there. “Things happen to other people, not to me” is a common story worth examining.
3. Embodiment: Your Body Believes the Story
There’s a reason mindset work alone doesn’t create lasting change: your body carries the memory of your stories. It knows the weight of them, the survival strategy behind them, and all the emotion attached to them.
It’s not just mental—it’s physiological. These stories live in your nervous system. They show up in chronic tension, shallow breathing, the instinct to shrink, or the constant urge to do in order to feel safe.
Until your body feels safe enough to release those old strategies, no amount of thinking will fully change the pattern.
The nervous system doesn’t just need new thoughts. It needs new experiences—evidence that it’s safe to inhabit a different reality. This is where embodiment work becomes essential.
Start small. For example:
Feel the fear of resting, and then re-train your body incrementally to feel safe doing less. Maybe it’s as simple as putting down one task this week you thought was non-negotiable—and not replacing it with something else. Breathe through the discomfort until rest becomes normalized, not threatening.
Notice when your instinct is to rush, fix, or fawn—and practice staying with the sensation instead of acting it out.
Explore somatic practices that teach your body what safety, worthiness, and capacity feel like in the moment, not just as concepts.
The life you want isn’t attracted to the version of you who thinks about it—it’s drawn to the version of you embodying the essence of that life.
Resonance matters. We don’t attract what we’re chasing. We attract what our body believes is safe and possible. When you embody ease, love, abundance, or creative flow—bit by bit—you become a match for the life you’re calling in.
The Invitation
When we understand that the mind works in story—that narrative is simply how we’re wired to make sense of the world—we get to choose: Do we keep repeating the stories that work against us, or do we begin choosing the ones that work for us?
Stories that nurture us. Stories that support who we’re becoming. Stories that make the life we dream of not just possible—but inevitable.
You are not your story. You are the storyteller.
This is lifelong work. But every time you pause, question, and choose something new—you’re rewriting the narrative. You’re shifting from survival to self-leadership.
Ready to Go Deeper?
If you’re feeling the pull to uncover the stories running your life—and finally start living from a place that feels true, aligned, and fully yours—I’d love to support you.
This is the heart of the work I do—helping people spot the patterns they can’t see on their own, reconnect with their authentic energy, and rewire what no longer serves them.
Through 1:1 coaching or a Human Design reading, we’ll map the beliefs, conditioning, and survival strategies shaping your story—and give you the tools to shift them at the root.
