The Grasshopper had a message for the theatre performer in all of us: “Drama keeps trauma alive.”

Most of us have experienced what the dictionary calls trauma: a deeply disturbing or distressing experience. It’s what follows that determines our level of suffering.

If we go on and on about our trauma, it morphs into drama. The length of drama’s stay is how often we choose to feed it.

Rest assured that the amount of drama we have in our life equals the amount of suffering we experience. Suffering is the result of keeping the story of the trauma alive so it can make us a little more dead each day.

There are dates on the calendar that can trigger past traumatic events in our mind. Think 9/11 as an example. If we go on a story telling binge each time a past, distressing thought enters our mind, we have entered the land of drama where suffering is free for the asking.

We believe, without evidence, that another telling of our story will help end or mitigate our suffering. The real world result is this: it only exacerbates and elongates it.

The drama of our story keeps our suffering in place with no place for it to go as long as we keep it as the main act in our show.

We keep our traumas alive by slipping into drama. Drama is the endless recounting of our story. I’d like to quote author Byron Katie who asks: “Who are you without your story?”

My experience is you’re a person who doesn’t needlessly suffer by your own hand any more, once you let your story walk out the door.

We all have a story that we’ve told too often. What we may not have recognized is that the drama it creates doesn’t serve us; it just continues our suffering.

If you truly want to end your suffering, a good place to start is to stop telling your story. Doing so will never change the fact that your trauma happened; it will just not feed the drama any more, and will keep your suffering from making multiple encores.

All the best,

John