When Story Becomes Shelter

The human mind is designed to protect us from harm. Sometimes that protection is emotional. Instead of shutting off physical pain so you can get to safety, the mind makes up a story to distract you from the emotional pain you’re feeling — or blocks an experience out entirely because you’re unable to process it. It’s common for children who go through traumatic things to simply shut them down, because the mind doesn’t yet have the capacity to understand the experience well enough to process it. Those things linger in the background until the adult mind is ready to dig them out.

Let’s be honest about the human experience: sometimes the best we can do is learn to cope. We can’t fix it. We can’t solve it. When the emotions are overwhelming and we don’t yet have a way through, coping allows us to keep going.

Sometimes coping means telling stories — often unrelated stories. It means focusing on external experiences we might otherwise overlook. Distraction helps keep the emotion manageable until we have the scaffolding in place internally to work through it.

I’ve been the sobbing mess in the corner many times in my life. Eventually, my mind distracted me so that I could stop crying and move on. I coped with the emotions instead of actually dealing with them, because I didn’t yet have the skills to handle them.

Through my healing journey I’ve been given the tools to manage those emotions. One of the key lessons I learned was to stop telling the stories. But sometimes that can be really difficult. When you’re a ball of tears in the corner, you’re not logically processing what’s happening — the mind is justifying the emotion with anything, whether it makes sense or not.

How do you get from being a sobbing mess to being a logical human being again?

Cry it out — with purpose.

I’ve said a million times that I’m not a fan of “crying it out.” I don’t believe we need to do that. There’s no need to force yourself to cry. But if you’re already there — if the tears have already started — the process changes. At that point, resistance just keeps the emotion circling. You’re not choosing to cry; it’s choosing you.

So let it move. You can’t stop it. You don’t need to justify it. Just cry until the tears run out. The purpose, at that point, is to let the emotions temper themselves through crying.

There have been a handful of times in my healing journey when the tears came whether I wanted them to or not — and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. So I let them go until they stopped, and then I turned around and asked what that was about. Where did that come from?

I immediately re-engage the logical mind to make sense of the emotion. If I cry myself to sleep, I make sense of the emotion when I wake up. I don’t just walk away from my emotions without also processing them logically. Crying isn’t enough on its own.

That’s really important to remember — you have to do more than just cry. The release is necessary, but it’s only the first step. Once the emotion has moved through, you have to meet it with logical awareness. If you stop at crying, the story will build itself again to make sense of what you didn’t resolve. That’s how we end up looping through the same pain, telling the same stories, and mistaking the story or the crying for the healing.

The emotion came from somewhere — it’s your job to find out where and unwind the story behind it. That’s what stops the pain from looping back. You can cry it out, but if you don’t do the work afterward, the feeling just hides until the next trigger. Logical processing after emotional release gives you the scaffolding to actually work through the pain without being overwhelmed.

Think of it like shaking a bottle of soda. The carbonation inside is the emotion. When something external shakes you, pressure builds. If you just open the bottle, it explodes — soda everywhere. Crying is that sudden release, the body’s way of venting pressure. But logical processing is what comes after — the cleanup, the understanding of why the bottle exploded in the first place, so you can open it more gently next time.

Now imagine what would happen if you shook every carbonated drink you ever opened because you’d never connected the shaking to the explosion.

People do that with crying all the time.

The biggest objection I hear in my work is to this step — the logical processing. People are terrified of their own minds. They think logic will cancel out the emotion, or that analyzing it will somehow make them cold or disconnected. But the mind isn’t the enemy; it’s the tool that helps the body make sense of what it already felt.

That’s what therapy is, really: putting words to feelings. At its core, therapy is a process of creating logical understanding from emotional chaos. It’s not supposed to be judgment or rule-making, though that’s often what it becomes when filtered through human systems. The real work is integration — giving the emotion a name, a shape, and a place to rest so it doesn’t keep cycling through the body as unwanted fits of sobbing in the corner.

Therapy is where you go to understand why every carbonated drink explodes when you open it. It’s where you learn to stop shaking your drinks.

I saw a psychologist in my late teens. She absolutely kept me alive. She gave me a logical understanding of why I was feeling the way I was. But it didn’t go far enough. I kept cycling through the same emotions throughout my twenties and thirties. The truth was, she was a child psychologist — and when I turned eighteen, I was no longer considered a child. Therapy stopped because I’d aged out of her care.

By the time I found my healing path in my forties, I’d cried my feelings out more than enough. I could logically process them without re-living the moments of sobbing in the corner. If you shake a carbonated drink long enough, it eventually goes flat. I guess you could say I went flat too.

But flat doesn’t equal healed. It’s more numbness than healing. So I’ve spent the last ten or more years understanding pain more than feeling pain, because I did enough feeling before I learned that logic mattered too.

The stories I used to tell about what other people said or did weren’t true. Logic helped me let go of the story of blame. I realized there was more to that path than just taking responsibility for how I felt. There was a whole other layer built on human rules and ideas of fairness — the same rules that the story of blame was built on.

What I came to understand was that the scaffolding holding the story of blame up is just as faulty as the story itself. That realization led me into metaphysical philosophy. The world is far more logical than we give it credit for. The human rules provide a kind of scaffolding — structures that hold up many of the stories we tell about what happens in our lives.

When I began to strip that away, I saw it wasn’t that complicated. Simple cause and effect — or what people sometimes call energetic balancing — was really the only thing at work. Everything else was just human reasoning trying to make sense of experience. That meant understanding my own impact on an experience was a critical part of the story. It was also the only thing I had any control over.

Understanding my impact doesn’t mean I turn into a doormat or a pretzel. I don’t have to conform or give in — but I do need to stop projecting my pain onto others and learn to hold my ground without blowing up or defending myself.

Managing my impact doesn’t “fix” everything; people are still going to do what they’re going to do. But it mitigates a lot of the problems I used to run into.

Why does that matter?

Because it means my experiences no longer offer me pain to process. I’m no longer wounded by the things that happen. I no longer feel victimized by my experience. I no longer need the scaffolding of human stories and rules to understand it through.

Living without the scaffolding can feel like living without a safety net. What do you do with the things that have happened to you if you no longer have all that structure holding them up?

Integrate them.

Integrate them by understanding yourself within them — by realizing that human rules aren’t needed to explain or justify experience. Experience is just a thing that happens. Your justification of it is what keeps you from being able to fully integrate it.

Most experience is simply cause and effect. Sometimes you’re part of the effect without ever having any awareness of the cause. But that’s what happens when you put seven billion people in the same place at the same time. Sometimes we bounce off each other in ways we don’t necessarily want or like.

That shouldn’t stop you from being able to fully integrate it. When you let go of the story of blame and realize that things are just going to happen, life gets easier — not because you don’t care, but because you’ve stopped trying to make sense of experience using faulty scaffolding.

The sideways bouncing off each other is a natural part of co-existence. It’s not under our control — and that’s the part we struggle to accept. It’s also why we try to build so much scaffolding and why we spend so much time making rules for other people to follow — we’re trying to control the bounce.

But we can’t.

And that’s a hard thing to admit. We have to accept cause and effect and the natural rhythm of co-existence in a world full of people and experiences we can’t control.

Love to all.

Della