Recently, someone asked me about my journey of ending up in the UK. I had to go back 10 years to answer that question, drawing from my life story, and what emerged was a fascinating story of travel, exploration, and self-discovery. My audience responded enthusiastically: “What an interesting life!”

But here’s what struck me afterward: I could tell that exact same 10-year period in a completely different way. And both versions would be true.

This realization led me to an experiment that revealed something profound about how our minds work, and how we create our sense of self through the stories we tell.

Version 1: The Adventure Story

My last decade has been an incredible journey of exploration and self-discovery. I left Italy with a desire to experience different cultures and ways of living. I traveled through Europe, absorbing new languages and meeting fascinating people from diverse backgrounds.

Each location taught me something unique. I worked in various settings and through various professions, building resilience and adaptability. I studied new skills, challenged myself repeatedly, and discovered my calling in hypnotherapy. Eventually, I established myself professionally in the UK, built a successful practice, and created a platform to share insights about the subconscious mind.

It’s been a rich collection of experiences: the story of someone brave enough to follow their curiosity and create an authentic life aligned with their values.

Version 2: The Struggle Story

For the past 10 years, I’ve been wandering without a fixed home. I left Italy without a clear plan, driven more by dissatisfaction than purpose. I moved from place to place, never settling, never truly belonging.

There were periods of financial insecurity and deep self-doubt. Why couldn’t I just be normal and settle down like everyone else? I worked various temporary jobs, always feeling like the outsider. Relationships were challenging to maintain because I never stayed anywhere long enough.

Even after arriving in the UK, there was a persistent question: “Have I just been running in circles for 10 years?” The constant uncertainty and lack of stability has been exhausting. A decade of searching without stability.

Version 3: The Neutral Facts

Over the past 10 years, I’ve lived in several countries. I left Italy in my late twenties and eventually settled in the UK. During this period, I worked in different fields while exploring career options. I had both positive and challenging experiences.

I discovered an interest in hypnotherapy, pursued training, and established a practice. I also started creating educational content online. It’s been a fairly typical journey for someone navigating their twenties and thirties, exploring new paths, questioning the meaning of life and trying different things to eventually find a direction. For now.

The Mind-Blowing Reality

All three stories contain elements of truth. I’m not lying in any version. The facts remain identical: the places, timeline, and events are the same.

What changes is which memories I selected in my life story and how I interpreted them.

In the first story, I chose positive images: growth, courage, learning, purpose. I connected those dots into a narrative of empowerment and adventure.

In the second story, I selected difficult images: uncertainty, instability, loneliness, doubt. These dots formed a narrative of struggle and aimlessness.

In the third story, I simply described events without heavy emotional interpretation.

This is exactly what your brain does with your life story, constantly, unconsciously. It connects dots all the time.

Why Your Mind Creates Stories

Your brain is designed to create meaning and find patterns. It connects memories, experiences, and emotions into a coherent narrative that establishes your sense of self, your identity that distinguishes you from others, and your life story.

This tendency serves useful purposes. It helps you navigate daily life, make decisions, and understand your preferences and behavioral patterns.

However, this same mechanism can become problematic when it creates self-images that limit your potential and harm your mental health.

When you’re caught in a negative emotional pattern, your mind repeatedly selects the same negative memories, interprets them through an unresourceful lens, and strengthens the same limiting narrative. This creates a self-reinforcing loop that feels permanent and unchangeable.

The story becomes your identity. You believe “this is just who I am” or “this is just my life.”

But it’s not who you are. It’s just a story your mind created by connecting certain dots in a particular way at a specific time.

How Emotions Colour Your Memories

The emotional state you’re experiencing when you recall a memory affects your interpretation of it. And eventually your life story.

When you’re in a resourceful state, feeling confident, happy, capable, your mind more easily accesses positive memories. Your emotional state functions as a filter, surfacing memories that match that frequency.

Conversely, when you’re in an unresourceful state, feeling anxious, depressed, or overwhelmed, your mind retrieves memories associated with those emotional states. Similar emotional frequencies activate similar neural pathways.

This explains why depression makes it so difficult to remember feeling good. Your current state makes positive memories less accessible, while the memories that do surface get reinterpreted through your current depressive lens.

This creates a feedback loop: negative emotional states trigger negative memories, which reinforce negative interpretations, which deepen negative states, which trigger more negative memories.

Understanding this mechanism is the first step toward breaking the cycle.

The Role of Subconscious Beliefs

Often, the stories we tell ourselves are driven by deep-rooted subconscious beliefs formed during childhood. Perhaps a parent, teacher, or peer gave us a belief that we’ve carried ever since, even though it no longer serves us.

Common limiting beliefs include:

• “I’m not good enough”
• “I always fail”
• “I’m unlovable”
• “Success requires struggle”

These beliefs operate like filters in your subconscious, changing how you perceive different memories. Events that could be interpreted neutrally or positively get filtered through limiting beliefs and emerge negative.

For instance, if you hold a subconscious belief that “I always fail,” your mind highlights failures and minimizes successes when reviewing past experiences when creating your life story. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces the original belief.

The same collection of memories could be interpreted entirely differently if the underlying belief shifted to something like “I learn and grow from every experience.”

How to Rewrite Your Story

The transformative news: thanks to neuroplasticity, your brain’s ability to form new neural connections, you can change these patterns. Here are three powerful approaches:

1. Mindfulness and Meditation

Through meditation practices, you learn to dis-identify with your thoughts. You begin recognising thoughts as mental events rather than absolute truths about yourself.

Regular meditation trains your mind to observe without becoming entangled in narratives. You watch thoughts arise and pass away, noticing emotions without identifying with them.

This practice creates space between you and your thoughts, a space where choice emerges. The choice to not believe every story your mind generates.

Start with 10 minutes daily: Sit quietly, focus on your breath, and when thoughts arise, simply notice them without judgment. Label them “thinking” and return to your breath.

2. NLP and Reframing

Neuro-Linguistic Programming teaches reframing, putting a different interpretive frame around the same events. The events don’t change, but your perception shifts dramatically and your life story too.

When you catch yourself in a disempowering narrative, ask:

• “How else could I interpret this experience?”
• “What did I learn from this?”
• “What strengths did I develop?”
• “How did I grow?”

You’re not denying what happened, you’re choosing a more empowering interpretation.

Exercise: Take one difficult past experience. Write the negative story you usually tell. Then deliberately write a different version focusing on learning, growth, or developed strengths. Notice how different it feels and it changes your life story.

3. Hypnotherapy for Deep Transformation

Hypnotherapy accesses the subconscious mind where deep-rooted beliefs reside. Through hypnosis, we can:

• Identify underlying belief systems
• Understand their origins
• Transform them into empowering beliefs
• Rewire neural pathways at a subconscious level

This approach is particularly powerful because it works at the level where these patterns formed, in the subconscious, making changes more profound and lasting than conscious techniques alone.

Your Story Is Not Fixed

Your life story is continuously being created and recreated by your mind, moment by moment, through the associations you make and interpretations you assign to experiences.

The same life story can be told in radically different ways depending on which memories you select and how you interpret them. Your emotional state, underlying beliefs, and current mindset all influence which story emerges.

This tendency to create narratives can be useful for daily functioning, but it becomes detrimental when it generates limiting self-images that hold you back.

The empowering truth: through neuroplasticity, awareness, and conscious practice, you can change your life story. You can reframe memories, shift interpretations, and choose more resourceful narratives.

This isn’t about denying reality or embracing toxic positivity. It’s about recognizing that you have more power over your life story than you might have realised.

We Create Stories About Others Too

This pattern extends beyond self-perception. We also create stories about others, placing them in mental boxes based on limited information and our own interpretations.

When you encounter someone’s carefully curated success life story online, remember it’s the version they’ve chosen to present. Everyone contains multiple stories and versions of themselves, far more complex than any single life story suggests.

This understanding cultivates compassion for yourself and others. We’re all more multifaceted than the life story we tell or the stories told about us.

Taking Action

Start by noticing the life story you’re telling yourself. Question whether it serves you. Experiment with reframing. Practice meditation to create space from your thoughts.

If you’re feeling stuck or realize your narrative isn’t resourceful, consider working with a hypnotherapist who can help you access and transform deep subconscious patterns.

Remember: you are the author of your life story, and you can always choose to write the next chapter differently.

Your life story is yours to write. What will you create?

Feeling stuck in a version of yourself that no longer fits?
If you recognise yourself in these stories, hypnotherapy can help you explore and transform the subconscious patterns shaping your life narrative.
✨ You don’t have to stay in the same story.
Book a hypnotherapy session with me here