Why Catherine Porter Took Her Childhood Bully To Lunch

Last week, I came across this remarkable essay by Catherine Porter. (Thanks to coach Tanya Geisler for sharing it).
 
Porter tells the story of running into her childhood bully on the street – 30 years after elementary school, both women now adults. Courageously, Porter decides to take her bully to lunch. The essay is beautifully written and really worth a read.
 
One of the things I love about the story, is Porter’s description of how her self-image is still impacted by her childhood experiences of being bullied. Even though she’s now a successful, adult woman, on “darker days” she can still hear the bully’s voice, telling her “No one likes you. You are a loser.”
 
I know I can relate to this, and so many women I know can too. There are a few early experiences – things someone said to us – that really got stuck in our heads. Maybe it was the boy that said the mean thing about how you looked. Or the teacher that said you were bad at a particular subject in school. Or maybe it was a mean girl at school who teased you. Most of us have had some very painful moment that still lives in us, that still shapes how we see ourselves.
 
Research shows our brains have a “negativity bias” – we are more alert to negative experiences than positive ones. We pay more attention to potential threats than to cues that demonstrate our saftey – emotional or physical. Research also shows that if a person has a good experience and a bad experience close together, they will feel worse than neutral. This is true even when they judge the two experiences to be of similar importance. It seems we are hard-wired to focus more on the negative than on the positive.
 
But here’s another interesting thing – negativity bias fades as we age. When we are younger, when our brains are still developing, we are particularly susceptible to it. As we get older, our attention becomes more evenly divided between the positive and negative experiences. In other words, our attention gets less biased, more balanced.
 
That’s something important for parents to remember: that their children will naturally be strongly attentive to, and imprinted by negative experiences. That’s something that needs to be noticed, talked about, and dealt with as a reality. And it’s something important for all us to think about in ourselves. What early negative ideas about yourself got imprinted somewhere in you – and how are they still impacting you? What if those are just false stories – more a reflection of mean girl’s pain or a teacher’s incompetence than anything enduring or important about you?
 
Catherine Porter took her childhood bully to lunch in order to update her old story about the bully and about herself. What can you do to let go of an old self-concept that isn’t serving you?
 
Love,
 
Tara
 
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In other news, registration for the next session of Playing Big, my leadership program for women who want to change the world for the better, opens in a few weeks! The program begins in January 2012.
 
The Playing Big course is for you if:
* You want to be more effective and have a greater impact in changing the world
* You feel a calling or a creative inspiration — but you aren’t moving forward with it as powerfully as you could
* You are held back by self-doubt, fear, or procrastination
* You suspect it would be a whole lot more fun to play bigger. (YOU ARE RIGHT.)
 
This is my core program: an in-depth, six month process, where I teach the tools that have been most powerful for me and for my women clients in our own journeys to playing bigger in the world.
 
If you’d like to be on the advance list for updates about Playing Big, sign up here. You’ll receive updates on course details, be the first to know when registration opens, and have access to the early registration discount. Click here to sign up.
 
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My book, Your Other Names: Poems for Wise Living is here, and I’m delighted to share that its a top 50 Poetry Best Seller at Amazon.com.
 
Life gets hectic. In the midst of busy days, too many emails, family and work pressures, we get caught up in the whirlwind. We get lost from ourselves. We all need ways to return, to find center again, to tap into a sense of peace. That’s what my new book, Your Other Names, provides: short readings that provide a pathway back to gratitude and peace. Click here to learn more about it.