Antonio Pascual-Leone

But then you could also think about, you'd get a different piece of paper if you wanted to do it as an exercise.

You know, saying goodbye to the bad things, the things that I put up with or tolerated.

It might be, you know, the idiosyncratic quirks that that person had, which I didn't really enjoy, but was part of the relationship.

And you just sort of took it.

It was, you know, so that that's a different sort of thing.

And listing those.

Right.

I never really liked when the person did X, but and now I don't have to put up with it anymore.

Yes.

And then this third piece is...

the hopes and dreams, you know, and this is tricky because there's all sorts of things that you hoped would happen or that you imagined would happen.

And those two are part of the relationship.

It's like surplus reality, right?

It didn't happen, but it was kind of baked into my experience of the relationship.

Like one day we would have children or one day we would go on that trip together.

And now those things, those will never happen, right?

So there's all these undeclared losses and kind of putting up, I'll call it little tombstones for those things, helps make them more real and helps make them easier to let go of.

will both shape the emergence of a story and describe the story.

So one thing we were doing is getting people to write about traumatic experiences or the most difficult experiences they've had and then looking at the way they tell those stories, right?

And it turned out that there were certain markers and you've mentioned them here, the sort of the same old story and also the superficial story