Heal Yourself: Change Your Story | The Truth Hurts Ep. 99

The conversation

You already know exactly where your fear comes from, and you still find yourself in the same place. Gili says the problem is not understanding. Knowing your traumas and seeing what your parents left in you matters, but it is not healing. The way she sees it, healing happens only in the moment you stop telling the old story and start living a new one, and there is a simple test for it: if it is really working, it should show on the outside too.

The truth

The heaviest regret is avoiding the thing you are afraid of: giving in to self-doubt, telling yourself this is not the time, and never doing anything concrete about it.

Understanding your traumas and what your parents passed on to you is not enough. Awareness without action in the real world is not healing.

Real healing, in her words, is to stop telling the story that broke you and start living the story that built you.

Whatever you are certain of is what you will see. If you are convinced that nothing works out for you, you will collect the evidence for it, and it works exactly the same way in the other direction.

Working from Shakespeare's line that all the world's a stage, Gili argues that everyone who criticizes you, competes with you or challenges you has come to teach you something about yourself.

Questions and answers

What does it actually mean to really heal?

Not another round of understanding your traumas. Healing happens the moment you stop telling the story that broke you and start living the story that built you. In other words, it is not enough to understand why you act the way you do. You have to act differently.

What will I regret most if I just keep waiting for the right time?

That you did not walk straight into the fear. Gili spells it out: giving in to self-doubt, talking yourself into believing that something is impossible, telling yourself that you are not enough or that this is not the time. That is the surest road to the most painful regret there is.

Why does healing my own traumas matter for my children too?

Because if we do not heal ourselves, the trauma passes on to the children. They do not learn from what they are told. They learn from what they actually see, like how you react under pressure, how you handle conflict and how you are in your relationship.

Gili's original episode description

Real healing happens when you stop telling the story that broke you and start living the story that built you. You can sit on a therapist's couch for years, opening wounds and telling stories, but let me let you in on a simple secret: you change your story, you change your life.

If you believe that nothing works out for you, you will pick up every single sign that nothing works out for you. If you believe that everything is working out for you, you'll start noticing all the signs that things actually are.

You can talk about healing endlessly, go on retreats, go to sessions, read books, listen to podcasts. All of that is fine. But in the end you want results, don't you? At least that's what I think.

The way I see it, there is no point in the inner work if I am not getting feedback in the physical, outer world too, something that shows me I am doing the right work. I put in the time, I made the effort, so where are the results? I understood the traumas that run me, I understood what my parents projected onto me, I recognize my fears and my lack of self-worth. I am aware of it! But here is the thing: awareness is not enough. You have to embody it.

All the world's a stage, Shakespeare said, and he was right. We are all actors. Play your parts, and understand that everyone else is an actor too: anyone who criticizes you has come to teach you to trust your own inner voice, anyone who competes with you is teaching you about what makes you singular, anyone who challenges you has come to show you the healing you need, and everything here that feels unclear, all that uncertainty, has come to teach us to surrender, to trust and to let go.

In this game of life you either win, or you give up before you win. That is it. Those are the options. There are always reasons to quit. You just need to have more reasons to keep going. Or as Rav Kook said: as long as the candle is burning, it is still possible to repair.