Today is World Book Day.  Every year the girl’s school goes all out and everyone dresses up as their favourite book character (even the teachers!).  My three girls are still at the ‘fairies and princesses’ stage of books, though it won’t be long before I introduce them to the worlds of ‘The Famous Five’, ‘Harry Potter’ and Roald Dahl.

This is them all dressed up before school this morning as Grace the Glitter Fairy, Winnie the Witch and Sleeping Beauty:

As today is all about books (and also because my girls constantly have their noses buried in one!), I started thinking about the influence that books have on our lives.  More specifically, the influence that the stories within them have on our lives.

When I was younger I read constantly, with a varied bibliographical diet ranging from ‘Nancy Drew’ to ‘Swallows and Amazons’ to ‘Sweet Valley High’.  The latter series was about the daily dramas of identical twins – blond, American, a perfect size 6.

Yep, size 6.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that in America a size 6 is the equivalent of a UK size 10.  So I grew up unconsciously believing that to be perfect I needed to be a size 6.  I’m not saying that caused me to develop anorexia – it didn’t.  It was just a belief that was there in the background that I held onto for quite some time.

Numerous other books have had a profound (and far more positive!) effect on me as I’ve got older – all for completely different reasons.  ‘The Hobbit’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’, ‘The Horse Whisperer’, ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, ‘The Time Travellers Wife’, ‘The Fault in our Stars’, and most recently ‘The Book Thief’, to name but a few. Without fail I’ll find a way to relate some aspect of whatever book I’m reading back to a current situation that I happen to be in, and regularly figure out what I need to do next by accompanying the hero/heroine on their journey through the pages.

So how does all of this relate to therapy?

When I see an eating disorder client for the first time, they’ve usually (but not always) already been through the system – GPs, psychiatrists, psychologists, various other therapists, clinics… By the time they get to me they’ve already told their story dozens of times (at least).

If I know this to be the case, my first question to them is usually something along the lines of “So, how can I help you?  What’s the story so far?”.  Straight away they launch into their story one more time.  They’ve rehearsed it so much that they don’t even need to think about it any more – to them it is the absolute truth, written on the pages of their unconscious mind like marker pen on paper.  They start reeling off the dates and weights and events that have got them to where they are now.  It usually takes quite a while.

Once they’re done they look at me with expectant, haunted, hopeful eyes, waiting for the verdict on whether I think I can help them or not.

I don’t give them that verdict.

Instead I might say “And if you could write the next part of that story – starting from today – and give that story the ending you would want to read, what would you write?”

They blink.  Most haven’t thought about it like that before.  They just know that they don’t want to be where they are any more.

“And if there were parts of your story that you wish you could re-write, or change, or delete, which parts would those be?” (This question gives me clues as to which bits of their past might be useful for us to work on together).

We all have a story.

How we think of ourselves in that story – the victim, or the hero, or the bystander for example… – has a major impact on how we live our lives.  Sometimes stories get passed down through families, generation after generation.  Anxiety and depression are fairly common.  I’ve lost count of the number of times a client has told me that they struggle with anxiety, only to go on and say that their Mum or Dad really suffered with it too.

What’s important is knowing that we all have the ability to write our own story.  It’s not being written for us – it’s up to us to choose what to write.  Just because a parent struggled with anxiety doesn’t mean that we have to.  We can change it.

If this has got you thinking, and if you love books as much as I do (which I’m guessing most of you do), have a ponder over the questions below and see what you come up with.  You might be surprised at how your story turns out…

~  What’s your story so far?

~  If you could, which parts would you go back and re-write (and why)?

~  How do you want the next chapter of your story to be?

~  How do you want your story to end?

I’d love to get feedback on your answers to the questions, so if you do the exercise please do come back and leave a comment.  Thank you.