How to Untangle the Story of Your Life
Photo by Brook Anderson on Unsplash
“Imagine that you have a tangled ball of yarn in your hand. It is called ‘life.’ When you are ready, you can lay it on the table between us, and we are going to try to find one of the ends of the yarn with which to begin. Little by little, as you tell your story, we will unravel and untangle. There may be a lot of knots in the yarn—some looser and some tighter. Together, we will stop at those knotted places, gently untie them, and continue untangling the thread.
Eventually, we will reach the other end of the ball of yarn. It will take time, courage, a good dose of patience, and lots of hard work. In the end, we will have the yarn laid out on the table between us. We will be able to look at it together, examine it from different angles, admire its beautiful colors and patterns, and discover things in the yarn that you couldn’t see when it was in a knotted and tangled ball.”
That’s what debriefing is all about. It’s about telling our story and the power and release that comes with that experience. It’s about uncapping the bottle inside of us and letting it gush out. It’s about taking the tangled ball of yarn in our mind and in our heart—that messy knot called “life”—and untangling it bit by bit.
Eventually, we no longer only see the mess. We begin to see the beauty.
A Powerful Metaphor
I always use this image—this metaphor—when I am debriefing with someone. Together, we imagine that we are examining a tangled ball of yarn that has been placed on the table between us.
I recently discovered a new image and quote on Pinterest. It is now the cover of my debriefing notebook.
Isn’t that the truth? Don’t the threads of our lives often get tangled and knotted with pain, unmet expectations, loneliness, broken relationships? Instead of acknowledging the disappointment, loss, and brokenness that comes our way, we just shove it aside, shelve it, add it to our already-messy ball of yarn, or stuff it in our life’s drawer.
It seems easier and less painful to hide it and not acknowledge it.
One day, however, circumstances and situations come up in our lives that are connected to the yarn. Because we never untangled it, because we never untied the knots . . . the tangle just keeps getting bigger and bigger, messier and messier.
While many are still under stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19, whether we are in too close of quarters with family or fully isolated, our tangled yarn can loom larger and be harder to ignore than ever before. Let’s take some time together to go back to the root and untangle the mess.
Stop and Open the Drawer
Eventually, we have to stop, open the drawer, and take out the messy threads. Eventually, we have to take the time to pick apart the ball of yarn, untangle it, and lay it out on the table.
If not, we seem to get stuck somewhere in the knots.
We can’t move forward because we never went backward. We never disentangled it. We never talked about it. We never processed it.
We never told the story of the last chapter—closing it well—so we can’t seem to move ahead into the next chapter of our lives.
We got stuck.
Photo by Emma Louise Comerford on Unsplash
Overwhelming
When we finally pick up our ball of yarn and start looking at it lying on the table, it can seem overwhelming. We feel lost. We don’t know where to begin. It can be scary.
Having someone walk alongside us on the journey of untangling the knots in our life can make all the difference.
I can remember when we went to a retreat center for a 3-day debriefing. The tangled mess of our lives seemed beyond unknotting, beyond untangling, beyond healing.
On the first day, we didn’t know where to start. It all felt too overwhelming and too painful. However, we knew we had to work through the knots and tangles in order to find healing, awareness, hope, and clarity for a way forward.
If we didn’t do it, we were going to stay stuck.
The Road to Personal Discovery
Through gentle, loving, yet powerful questions, the debriefer led us down a road to personal discovery. Together, we rummaged through the messy ball of yarn and found one of the “ends” of the string. With that “end” in hand, we finally had somewhere to begin with our story. So, that’s what we did.
We began telling our story and laying our thread out on the table.
When there was a lot of pain and disappointment over a relationship or a situation, we would discover a knot in the yarn—a stuck place—a place that was “unfinished” or not yet neatly woven into our own story. There in that place, we would stop and linger. We couldn’t move on without taking the time and space needed to untie the knot. Through more questions and processing, we slowly and carefully untied it and moved on.
Eventually, after spending hours together, we had a very long thread of yarn laid out on the floor in front of us. Through more questions and processing, we began to examine and look at the thread from different angles—above, underneath, and from all sides. As light shined on the thread, we gained new understanding, new awareness, new clarity.
We could begin to see the beauty.
Stop and Linger
As we moved together along the thread of yarn, we saw and felt the deep pain at places in our story line. There, we would stop and linger. There, we would wait, we would grieve, we would sit, we would find comfort and healing—untangling in process.
At other places, in the new light, we discovered joy, gratefulness, and thanksgiving. We would stop in those places to rejoice and celebrate. . . to stand in awe. It was another place where the thread straightened out.
Then, we would move on. As we journeyed along the thread, we saw our entire story laid out and told. We saw it differently than when it was a knotted, messy, tangled ball of yarn.
We saw things that we could never have seen. We understood things that we could never have understood. We received healing in ways we never could have.
It took time, patience, and work to unravel, but it was so worth it! Imagine if we had chosen to keep the tangled, messy ball of yarn in our life’s drawer and missed the beauty of the thread.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
In meeting recently with someone for Personalized Care, I heard those long-awaited words.
“I think I’m starting to see it untangle.” she said with excitement and relief. *
I could see it coming . . . the moment when she would have all the yarn laid out on the table between us. We would begin looking at it together, examining it from different angles, admiring its beautiful colors and patterns, and discovering things that she couldn’t see when it was in a knotted and tangled ball.”
Then, afterwards, she could go and knit something beautiful and unexpected with the untangled ball of yarn—perhaps a new scarf!
( *shared with permission)
Guest author, Marci Renée, along with her French husband and four boys, is a global nomad who has traveled to more than 30 countries and has lived in the United States, France, Morocco, and Spain. She loves to travel, speak foreign languages, experience different cultures, eat ethnic foods, meet people from faraway lands, and of course, write and tell stories. She is a published author of children's picture books, memoirs, short stories, and poetry.
You can find Marci and her books on her website.
"The Cultural Story-Weaver," at www.culturalstoryweaver.com