The stories we tell ourselves about our bodies, about our weight, about our worth play a major role in our lives.

If you tell yourself that your weight dictates your worth, and the number isn’t what you want to see, there’s no doubt that the decisions you make in your self-care, relationships and other areas will be negative.

If you tell yourself that you’re weak for eating dessert, you’ll continuing berating yourself every time you eat something sweet — and you might start to see yourself as an utterly, hopelessly weak person.

If you tell yourself that you’re not good enough, you might reject healthy relationships and choose toxic ones.

You might not let yourself relax or have fun or do things that genuinely make you happy — because in your mind the tape that keeps playing over and over is that you don’t deserve these things.

In his book, The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life, psychologist Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D, who also writes the excellent blog Mindfulness & Psychotherapy on Psych Central, explains: “The narrative you hold about your life can contain some very limiting beliefs that keep you stuck. The good news is that you have the ability the rewrite your life story, starting today.”

The reason rewriting our negative stories is so important is because our stories feed into our behaviors. While I don’t think we’re victims to our thoughts, our stories do fuel unhealthy behaviors; what we say to ourselves boosts our body-bashing, lack of self-care and disordered eating.

These limiting stories narrow our lives, leading us to decline amazing opportunities and become unable to blissfully and genuinely enjoy ourselves.

Some of these stories may be so automatic that we don’t even realize that they’re derailing our decisions and lives. We start to see them as the whole truth — instead of what they are: made-up or inaccurate belief systems that we’ve invented over time.

In the book, Goldstein reveals the damaging story he invented as a child that impacted his sense of self and hurt his relationships.

The day my parents told us they were getting divorced, as most kids do, I took it upon my shoulders and planted a deep seed that their divorce was my fault and I was therefore unworthy of love. Because the divorce happened long ago, the belief slipped into my subconscious. It wasn’t something that was readily accessible to me, yet it influenced how I felt about myself and my intimate relationships. It formed a shell around my heart, and sometimes when someone tried to get in, the belief would shut me down and cause me to retreat further into that shell.

Once he became an adult, Goldstein realized that the story was plain fiction.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I was able to expose the belief and become aware that I was the one who had created the story. I could understand that the divorce wasn’t my fault. I realized that I am loved, and I felt the enclosure around my heart open and a flood of grief, love and awe pour out.

Goldstein features a valuable activity to help readers “dismantle our unhealthy stories and weave new ones.”

1. “Expose the belief.”

First, take a trip into your history and notice what sorts of experiences you might’ve used to create your limiting beliefs. Goldstein suggests identifying and writing down these beliefs. He says that “As you expose your beliefs, a space widens between your awareness and the thought or belief. This space is another ‘choice point’ where you can choose to come down from your thoughts and into the direct experience of your emotion.”

2. “Feel into the emotional reaction.”

The reason beliefs become so automatic and so strong is “because it has been programmed into deep emotional regions of your brain,” according to Goldstein. In order to work through our beliefs, we need to figure out the emotion that’s connected to them. “Is it fear, anger, guilt, shame or another feeling? Where is it in your body? …Does it come out as tightness, heaviness, tension or another feeling?

3. “Relate to emotion with compassion.”

In addition to identifying our emotions, it’s important to relate to them with compassion, Goldstein says. “As you dip your attention into the physical presence of the emotion, see if you can hold it with awareness. Imagine cradling it as you would a small baby. If this is difficult, imagine someone you know, living or dead, who symbolizes a wise and compassionate awareness, and imagine that person giving you comfort as you allow that feeling to flow through.”

If any judgments come up — such as “I just can’t do this” — Goldstein suggests noticing these thoughts and using his technique “see, touch, go.”

4. “Rewrite the story.”

Goldstein gives an example of a client named Julie whose parents constantly told her she wasn’t a good writer. Over time, to her, this belief became a fact. But in college she started getting positive feedback on her writing, which she couldn’t accept until she realized that being a bad writer was a story she told herself. Her being a good writer was a new story.

According to Goldstein, she was finally able to say to herself: “In the past I have had difficulty with writing due to my old story; this story is not fact, and moving forward I’m going to open up to the new possibility that I am indeed a good writer.”

He concludes the chapter by stressing that it’ll take time to rewrite our stories, but we’ll get there.

Whatever your limiting beliefs are, they’ve likely been repeated in your mind over and over again so that this limiting story is deeply ingrained and automatic. It can take some time to shake an old story and retrain your brain, so you don’t go into this practice expecting immediate results; think of it as an experiment. Remember, you’re planting seeds for a new story, and it may take some time for it to take root. Be patient as your mind develops new neural connections that will soon begin to tell a new story of hope, ease and success.

Practice “Breathing in, I see my limiting belief, breathing out, I let it go and open to new possibilities.”

Goldstein discusses his excellent book here, where you can learn all about the “now effect.”

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    Last reviewed: 24 Feb 2012