The Significant Shift: The Step We Often Skip

Frozen emotions, in my experience, come from the stories of our past. To shovel them away and reclaim some capacity, it helps to investigate those stories at a deeper level and integrate them more fully. 

Most people can tell you what happened. That’s what I call the story structure: you can track the backstory, the catalyst, the rising action, and the climax. Those are outer events, much like the external plot of your favorite novel or movie. (If you do need to know more about story structure, specifically about applying story structure to a scene in your own life, you might check out this page.)

Story currents look beyond what happened. They include the internal movement of a story or a situation, which includes your emotion. They’re the other forces at play in the situation: some currents of these help, some hone, and some eddy.  

After the outer events quiet down, there’s an opportunity to complete the significant shift. Events culminate in a climax, which is involuntary. Those intense events can invite an answering realization inside an individual, an epiphany that changes the person’s understanding of themselves. Specifically, the individual can recognize how they’ve grown and how those outer events fit into the larger story of their life.

Instead, we’re encouraged to dust ourselves off and proceed to whatever outer event is next.  

Sometimes, that is the right call, especially in the middle of an ongoing crisis.

But if you go on that way for too long, you’ll see that build-up of emotion, like snow piled up on your porch. You have braved the elements too long, without managing them. You’ll risk collapse.