When the Story Becomes the Problem

Why Healing Sometimes Requires Less Talking, Not More

I often remind clients that human beings are creatures who create meaning. From the earliest days, we gathered around fires telling stories. Stories of survival, lineage, belonging, love, and loss. These narratives connected us to land, community, and something beyond ourselves. In their healthiest expression, stories help us orient. They offer a sense of who we are and where we stand.

Yet not every story heals. Some quietly hold us in place.

The Role of Story in Modern Therapy

Modern therapy has inherited this ancient reliance on narrative. Talk based approaches use story as a pathway into someone’s inner world. Through words, we learn what happened, how it was experienced, and what meaning was formed. At its best, this process brings validation, safety, and relief. Being heard matters. Being believed matters.

There are phases of healing where telling the story is essential. When someone is leaving abuse, emerging from shock, or finally naming something that was never witnessed, storytelling can be stabilising and protective. In these moments, talk therapy can quite literally save lives.

This is important. It deserves to be stated plainly.

When Telling the Story Stops Helping

And yet, after the initial phase of sharing and processing, something subtle can occur. The story stops evolving.

Many people return to therapy over months or even years, repeating the same narrative with the same emotional intensity. The details may sharpen. Insight may deepen. But the inner experience does not shift. Relief is temporary. Resolution remains elusive.

At this stage, the story is no longer a bridge. It has become a loop.

The Toxic Story

In the book Rapid Core Healing, Yildiz Sethi names this phenomenon the toxic story. A narrative that once described events begins to define identity. Often it is a story shaped by defeat, powerlessness, injustice, or victimhood. Not because these experiences were unreal, but because the nervous system has organised itself around them.

I see this often in practice. People are rarely attached to suffering itself. They are attached to what feels familiar. The brain confuses repetition with safety.

What Neuroscience Reveals

Neuroplasticity gives language to what therapists have long observed. Neurons that fire together wire together. Each time a story is retold with the same emotional charge, the same neural pathway strengthens.

From a neurological perspective, this is rehearsal.

When fear, shame, grief, or anger are repeatedly activated without resolution, those circuits become dominant. Over time, change feels further away rather than closer. This is not a failure of effort. It is biology.

Stephen Cooper and colleagues have noted that excessive focus on problems can be counter productive. Neuroscience helps explain why.

When Talk Therapy Can Cause Harm

This is where nuance matters. Talk therapy is not inherently harmful. Yet for people carrying entrenched trauma or long standing identity narratives rooted in pain, prolonged verbal processing can:

• Reinforce a victim based identity
• Re trigger emotional distress through repeated activation
• Strengthen limiting beliefs at a neural level

I have often noticed that clients who have spent many years in psychotherapy arrive deeply articulate about their pain, yet strongly identified with it. Healing then takes longer, not because of resistance, but because the story has become the self.

Meaning, Survival, and Choice

Viktor Frankl observed something extraordinary in the concentration camps. Survival did not belong only to the strongest, but to those who could locate meaning, hope, or a future orientation. Meaning did not remove suffering. It altered the relationship to it.

This insight remains central to healing today. How meaning is made shapes not only how we feel, but how we endure and move forward.

The Brain Does Not Know the Difference

Neuroscience and hypnotherapy converge on a striking reality. The unconscious mind does not reliably distinguish between past and present, or between remembered and imagined experiences. This is why stories carry such physiological weight.

A memory revisited with emotional charge is experienced as happening now. A new perception, when embodied, can form a new neural pattern even if historical facts remain the same.

Why Rapid Core Healing Works Differently

The therapeutic approach of Rapid Core Healing does not dismiss the story. It simply does not place it on a pedestal.

The story is used briefly as a guide rather than a destination. It reveals beliefs, emotional markers, and points of significance. But the work does not centre on retelling it repeatedly.

Instead, RCH engages the unconscious directly to resolve what remains unfinished. Emotions are accessed, processed, and released without reliving the narrative. Change becomes experiential rather than purely intellectual.

This distinction matters. Insight alone rarely resolves trauma. Completion does.

Healing Without Re Traumatization

Because RCH works beneath the narrative layer, it allows healing without repeated emotional flooding. The nervous system is not asked to reopen the wound again and again. It is guided toward completion.

As the emotional charge dissolves, the story naturally loosens its hold. A more spacious perspective emerges without force.

Epigenetics and the Possibility of Change

Emerging research in epigenetics shows that our internal environment influences gene expression. Thoughts, emotions, expectations, and patterns of meaning making all matter. Around ninety percent of genes respond to environmental signals, including emotional and relational contexts.

This tells us something hopeful. We are not condemned by our past. Patterns can shift, even those that were inherited.

Readiness Matters

Not everyone is ready to release their story. Some need time. Some find identity or community within it. That choice deserves respect.

Healing cannot be forced. It can only be offered.

Beyond the Story

A story is a viewpoint, not a sentence for life. The past is real, but it is not occurring now. When therapy supports someone in moving from repetition to resolution, from identity to agency, and from story to meaning, something quietly profound takes place.

The nervous system settles. The future feels accessible. And the person realises they were never only the story they learned to tell.

Camilla Clare is a naturopath and holistic health practitioner specialising in trauma informed healing, nervous system regulation, and mind body integration. Her work blends neuroscience, philosophy, and depth psychology to support lasting emotional and physical wellbeing.