The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Our Health

What if the identity you've built around your body isn't a fixed truth — but a familiar story that's ready to be questioned?

You are not your symptoms.

You are not your health history.

You are not the hardest thing you have lived through.

Those experiences are real. They matter. They may have shaped you deeply.

But they do not have to become the boundaries of who you believe you are.

I have been sitting with this idea for a while now and the more I explore it, the more I see how quietly significant it is for the women I work with.

The identities we build without noticing

Think about the statements you carry about yourself.

I am a mother. I am a wife. I am the one who gets things done. I am an overachiever. I am anxious. I have a terrible gut. I have always struggled with my health.

Some of these may be true in the sense that they describe real experiences you have had.

But there is a difference between experiencing something and believing it is who you are.

And that distinction - quiet as it is -can change everything.

We often think of ego as arrogance or self-importance. But there is another way of looking at it, one that Wayne Dyer explored beautifully in his work. The identity we build around ourselves, the collection of stories about who we are, what we are capable of, how we behave, what we need to be can become so familiar that we stop questioning it entirely.

The story becomes the lens.

And the lens becomes the limit.

Where I found this in myself

For a long time, I saw myself as an overachiever.

Being productive felt good. Accomplishing things felt safe. Moving forward felt like progress. And somewhere along the way I had attached a great deal of meaning to what I could accomplish -to what I could produce, complete and deliver.

Slowing down was not simply slowing down.

It felt like becoming someone I did not recognise.

That realisation stayed with me. Because I had to ask myself - was this the truth about who I was?

Or was it a story that had become so familiar I had stopped questioning whether it still served me?

I am not what I do.

And neither are you.

The health identities worth questioning

This is where I find the connection with health particularly fascinating.

How often do we say and quietly believe things like:

I am just an anxious person. I have a terrible gut. I have always had trouble with my weight. I have never been good at resting. I am just someone who pushes through. I have always been this way.

What if, instead of treating those statements as fixed truths, we became genuinely curious about them?

When did I learn this about myself? What has this pattern been helping me do? What happens inside me when I try something different? Is this still the only way I know how to respond?

This is not about dismissing your symptoms. It is not about suggesting that everything is subconscious or that you can simply think your way out of a physical health problem. Your symptoms are real. Your experience is real. Your body is doing something real.

It means we can become curious about the patterns that sit alongside our physiology and notice how the stories we tell about ourselves can quietly shape the way we experience our health.

What this looks like in practice

You can want better health without believing you are somehow inadequate until you achieve it.

You can want to lose weight without making your current body a measure of your worth.

You can want more energy without deciding that your exhaustion is your identity.

You can want your gut to feel better without becoming the woman with the terrible gut.

You can want more without making your present self wrong for not having it yet.

This is something I have come to understand deeply through my work and through my own journey with RTT hypnotherapy and the identity work that sits within it.

It has opened my eyes to how profoundly some of our beliefs and automatic responses can influence the way we see ourselves and how those patterns show up in places we would not necessarily expect, including our health.

Not so we can blame ourselves.

Quite the opposite.

So we can understand ourselves with more compassion.

Where possibility begins

Perhaps healing is not always about adding another supplement, finding another answer or becoming a better version of yourself.

Perhaps sometimes it is about creating enough space to notice:

What have I come to believe about who I am?

And is that belief still serving the woman I am becoming?

You do not have to reject your roles. You do not have to erase your past. You do not have to stop being ambitious, caring, capable or driven.

You simply get to remember that you are bigger than any one story you have learned to tell about yourself.

And that, to me, is where possibility begins.

A gentle next step

If something in this piece has landed for you- if you found yourself nodding, or sitting with a question you have not asked yourself before I would love to have a conversation.

I offer complimentary Body Clarity Sessions for women who are ready to look at their health differently.

Not just at the data, not just at the symptoms, but at the whole picture -including the stories, the patterns and the beliefs that sit quietly beneath it all.

You can book your session here → [insert booking link]

Or if you would simply like to read more about the way I work, you are welcome to explore further here.

From my heart space, Bec

Bec Divine is a Clinical Nutritionist, HTMA Specialist and RTT Hypnotherapist based in Mosman, Sydney. Her work brings together clinical nutrition, metabolic health, nervous system physiology and transformational coaching to help women understand what their body has been adapting to and what becomes possible when that burden is reduced.