chapter 1 The Story Behind the Story If I asked you to tell me your life story right now, what would you say? In all likelihood, you'd give me details about where you were born, how you grew up, the house you moved to when you were twelve, where you went to school, what you do for a living, and so on. Maybe you'd tell me about your first love or your first heartbreak.But would you tell me about the signal events that made you who you are now? Probably not, because you're most likely not even conscious of these. Most people aren't. For example, consider one of my patients from 1997.Erin, a successful healthcare professional, flew in to see me from St. Paul. She'd married late in life, and now thirty-nine, was trying to have a child.

She had suffered three miscarriages in the past eighteen months -- one of which was very late term -- and understandably, she was extremely upset. Her most significant medical problem was that she had an inverted uterus, a congenital condition. Several gynecologists told her it would be nearly impossible to carry a child to term because of this.During our first meeting, I asked her to tell me more about herself. Erin was born into a prominent family, but her mother died tragically when Erin was eleven. This event plunged the entire family into despair, disarray, and ultimately, for Erin, poverty. In the years that followed, Erin struggled with depression and a major back injury while doing everything she could to make her life successful. She put herself through two graduate degrees, visited a psychotherapist regularly, pursued philosophical and religious studies, and traveled the world.

Now she was at a crucial turning point, desperately wanting to have a child and to build her own healthy, loving family. From her perspective, doing so was the most important goal in the world.That was her history.Herstory behind the storywas another matter.As Erin spoke to me, I knew something more was going on than what I could learn from the bullet points of her life.Everyonehas a deeper story that goes beyond the mere events in their lives. This deeper story has a tremendous effect on us, one that is so much more intense than what we normally associate with our life stories. Yet, most of us remain unaware of a deeper story because we can't figure out a way to reach it -- because we don't even know it exists.

To get to Erin'sstory behind the story, I guided her into a hypnotic state and asked her to go to the place in her mind where she would find the knowledge she needed to get well. She went to the day of her mother's death and experienced those moments as though she was there again. She told me who was there with her, what people were saying, and what she felt.Suddenly, she gasped and said, "Pregnancy leads to death." I asked her to elaborate on this, and she told me her mother was seven months pregnant when she died. Since Erin was at the impressionable age of eleven, she linked the two events in her mind. She intertwined pregnancy and death and secreted this distorted "belief" in her subconscious from that day forward. Now this distortion was fueling her miscarriages because the subconscious mind has the important job of preserving our physical survival.

As soon as Erin found this distortion under hypnosis, she released it quickly (we'll discuss how this happens later in the book), breaking the link between these two concepts. At this point, the unfortunate connection she'd created between pregnancy and death could no longer do her physical harm. She'd found the part of her story that was preventing her from bringing a child into the world -- and she rejected it.Within three months, Erin called me to say she was pregnant. Despite her inverted uterus, she carried her son to term and started the family she desperately wanted. And in so doing, she changed her story.The Inextricable Connection between the Mind and the Body.