> [!NOTE] The Infinity Prompt by Allison Fallon > The following is called The Infinity Prompt from the book, [[The Power of Writing It Down]]: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life by Allison Fallon To make sure you know exactly what to do, I want to do more than just teach you what **The Infinity Prompt** is, I want to walk you through it the same way I would for anyone who comes to one of our Find Your Voice one-day workshops. You’ll need to pick a circumstance from your life that you’d like to write about. Maybe something specific comes to mind right away. There’s something you’ve been mulling over and need to process. Someplace where you’re stuck in one of those familiar “loops.” If nothing comes to mind right away, consider an event of your life that feels “charged.” By “charged,” all I mean is that it has some electricity to it. You feel it in your body. This could be something as simple as getting honked at in traffic this morning, or it could be the experience of losing your dad at a young age. Big event or small event, it doesn’t matter. The point is that it is an event that matters to you. Just in case something still doesn’t come to mind, I’ll say this. My husband is a person who doesn’t get his feathers ruffled easily. He’s incredibly evenly keeled, the yin to my yang, and when I was first explaining this prompt to him, he had a hard time thinking of any circumstance from his life that caused him to feel something in his body. He looked at me sideways, like I was speaking a foreign language. If this is you, there’s nothing wrong with you. In fact, you bring a great strength to those of us who feel everything in our bodies and easily lose control of our emotions. Also, this activity is going to be even more deeply healing and helpful for you than it would be for someone who answers this question more easily. If this is you, maybe put this book down and go for a walk around the block while you think. The right-left (bilateral) motion of walking helps you think and even activates your limbic brain, where old memories are stored. Don’t try to force yourself to come up with something. Trust that the right circumstance will come if you give it a little space and time. Once you have the event you’d like to write about, get out a pen and a piece of paper and answer the following questions. 1. **Facts: What are the facts of what happened?** “Something” took place in your life. When you write about facts, pretend you are describing it as though it’s happening in front of you on a movie screen. Or, pretend you are presenting the case in a court of law. Facts are the objective details of what happened: who, what, where, and when. 2. **Story: What is the story I am telling myself about what happened?**  We create stories based on our thoughts about the facts of what has happened to us. These stories stem from our interpretation of what happened. A great way to get to the story is to say, “What this meant to me was . . .” or “The reason I think this took place is . . .” 3. **Feelings: How do I feel about what happened and about the story I’m telling myself?**  A great way to name a feeling is to talk about where you feel it in your body. When you’re scared, your heart starts racing. When you’re embarrassed, your face gets flushed. When you’re worried, your stomach feels twisted into knots. So take a minute and go over what you’ve written above—the facts and the story. What do you feel in your body? 4. **Actions: What did I do to engage or disengage with what I felt?**  The action in the cognitive behavioral model is the thing you do because you feel the thing you felt, or to keep from feeling it. Most of us, being the brilliant people we are, have developed elaborate defenses against feeling unpleasant emotions like anxiety, anger, or shame. “To keep from feeling this feeling in my body, the action I take is . . .” Or “When I’m really angry, usually I . . .” 5. **Result: What was the outcome of my chosen action?** This is what happens as a result of your actions. For example, if your action (response to shame) is to hide, the result might be that you are isolated and alone. If you feel yourself getting defensive (“But it wasn’t my fault!”) or resistant (“What else could I have done?”), know that you're on the right track. This is all a natural and normal part of the journey you are on. Let me give you an example of how this prompt might work with a circumstance from your life. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the fact is that you’ve been single for a long time—ten years. Now, consider for a minute the story a person might make up because they’ve been single for ten years, the thought that runs through their head so quickly and easily that they probably don’t even recognize it as a thought. The story might be, “Nobody wants me,” or it might be, “I’m better off alone,” or maybe it’s, “People always leave anyway.” Whatever the story is, write it down. What is the unpleasant feeling you might feel if you were this person who has been single for ten years who keeps telling themselves, “Nobody wants me”? Maybe you’d feel loneliness, anger, or shame. Probably a whole cocktail of unpleasant emotions. If you imagine yourself as this person, right now, where do you feel these emotions in your body? Your gut? Your chest? Now, you’ll have to do some imaginative work here, but thinking of yourself as this person who has been single for ten years, who is telling yourself nobody wants you and feeling a heaviness in your chest that feels like a cinder block weighing you down, what might you do to avoid feeling this way? What action might you take to protect yourself (brilliantly) against feeling so sad? No matter what your answer is to the question (for example, “drink,” or “act like the life of the party,” or “try to prove that I matter by investing everything into my work,” or “guard myself against potential love interests so I don’t get hurt,”) you can see where this is going. The result you get from this action takes you all the way back to the facts of the situation. Single for ten years: the very thing you want to change. We sometimes get so focused on changing the outcome of our story that we don’t realize the thought pattern, memorized feeling, and brilliantly self-protective behavior have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before you beat yourself up for this, remember what we said about how the human brain works. This is a brilliantly designed system that has kept you and your ancestors alive for millions of years. This “rut” is called a neural pathway. Your brain is doing what it was designed to do. You can change it, but in order to do so, you’ll have to move your focus from outcomes to thoughts and feelings. What’s the gateway that gets you there? Your words have the power to break the pattern. Writing in which you name the facts, thoughts, and feelings becomes a diagnostic tool you can use any time to get at the root of what’s really going on with you, see clearly the stories you’ve been telling yourself, unwind the complicated emotions swirling beneath the surface, and carve a brand-new path forward. Writing will show you the stories you’ve made up about your life. It will show you how those narratives are just that—made up. And it will help you change the narrative so you can change the outcome. Writing helps us step outside of our stories and see them differently. It helps us reclaim our stories for ourselves again. When we remain unaware of facts, thoughts, and feelings we stay stuck on autopilot, living the same disappointing results over and over again. But when we bring them into our awareness through a writing practice, we give ourselves the incredible gift of clarity to see what needs to change and how. This is how we access our own agency instead of falling victim to the same old unfavorable results. Ready for some real change in your life? The Infinity Prompt is potent stuff. Now that you know the process, it’s time to put this practice on repeat. Twenty minutes per day. Four days per week. You’ll never run out of things to write about. You can shift the way you think about your life, the way you feel about the things that have happened to you, the way you respond to the world around you, and miraculously, you can even have an impact on the results. Nothing is left standing in your way anymore. ## Three Cautions When Writing for “Therapy” I need to address a few important cautions about writing for personal growth. Writing is therapy, for sure. It’s cathartic and an incredibly effective way to metabolize the events of your life—exactly what you’re doing when you go see a therapist. But if you’re going to become your own therapist without any formal training, there are some immediate concerns I’d like you to hold close. Let me dig into these concerns by telling you a story. A woman named Amy came to one of our workshops because she was feeling stuck and was ready to use writing as a tool to find some forward momentum in her life. I asked her, along with the rest of the group, to identify one area of her life where she would like to see some forward movement. Her response was, with her body. According to Amy, she’d been yo-yo dieting for years. Amy was tall, blonde, and the kind of woman who, if you saw her walking down the street, would probably catch your eye. She also struck me as the type who was typically immaculately dressed, since even at our workshop, where we spend over half the day up and down off the floor, her hair was perfectly blow-dried, and her nails freshly manicured. I asked Amy to tell me the facts of the situation. In other words, what was the physical, tangible thing she was trying to change? Amy collected herself before she spoke. “I’m fat,” she said. The whole room waited. “Okay, so you’re saying the facts of the situation are that you’re fat?” I asked her, to make sure I understood correctly. “Yes, that would be the fact.” I asked Amy if it would be okay if I pushed back a little bit. She agreed. I told her that, to me, the phrase “I’m fat” felt more like a thought about a fact than it did like a fact itself. I waited for a minute. Then, I asked Amy if I could show her why I thought this. She nodded her head, so I turned to the rest of the room. “How many of you here would call Amy fat? Raise your hands.” Of course, not a single hand in the room went up. Amy looked around the room. This is one way to determine if the “facts” of the situation that you’re trying to change are actually facts, or if they’re just thoughts or feelings: ask other people if they share the same interpretation of your reality. This is the first pitfall you might run into as you use this process for your own therapy. You might mistake your thoughts or feelings for facts. Together, Amy and I determined what the fact of the situation actually was. After asking some probing questions, I found out that Amy had recently gained ten pounds. That was the fact. The verifiable, indisputable detail. Next we turned to the story she was telling herself. She’d written down, “It’s not just the extra weight that bothers me. It’s that when I look in the mirror now, I cringe.” Ah, _cringe_. That sounded like a feeling to me. I asked Amy what the thought was that made her feel that cringe. She looked down at her paper. “I wrote here . . . that I am disgusted with myself,” she said. “Disgusted is actually a feeling,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a thought mixed in there, too. Could the thought be something like, ‘I’m disgusting’?” A wave of familiarity and grief washed over Amy’s face. This was a “thought” she’d thought about herself a thousand times, but she had never really stopped to put words to it. Putting words to our thoughts isn’t always easy, but it does give us the power to change them. This was the first time Amy had realized she was thinking such a violent thought about herself all the time. Having a hard time applying words to your thoughts is a second pitfall you might bump into. You can see how easy it is to do that from reading Amy’s example. When you encounter this obstacle, know this: you are making progress. You are taking a thought that was _unconscious_ and making it _conscious_. This, by the way, is exactly what you’re doing when you’re working with a gifted therapist. Later in this book, I will give you a few tips on beginning to learn how to do this for yourself. Am I saying that you should forego therapy (or fire your therapist) in lieu of this much cheaper option called expressive writing? Not exactly. In fact, this is the third pitfall I want to warn you about. There are a handful of great reasons to not take a chance on trying to be your own therapist—for example, if you’re dealing with mental health issues like chronic depression or anxiety, or any kind of trauma that needs to be treated by a professional. This would be like me telling you to build your own sling when you break your arm rather than going to the doctor. That would be irresponsible—for me and for you. Please don’t do that. What I am telling you is that, even if you’re struggling with your mental health, you can see why expressive writing would be such a great pairing for your work with a mental health professional. Expressive writing, when combined with a therapeutic process, can double or even triple your efforts by helping you multiply the therapeutic process between the times you see your therapist. What if you could begin to internalize the helpful phrases, suggestions, questions and even advice of your therapist, so it’s not just an external resource for you, but an internal one? Writing can help you do this. As you keep writing, I’ll show you how. By using expressive writing in tandem with therapy, I’ve seen clients save thousands of dollars and years of heartache by fast-tracking their progress. No matter who you are or what brings you to the practice of expressive writing, you do not have to figure things out alone. There are no brownie points for suffering or for getting it right. Your heart and mind are worth the investment, whatever it takes. Writing can be like therapy, but that doesn’t mean it always replaces therapy. Please do what is right for you. ## The Magical Power of Telling the Truth Sometimes when we’re stuck, we need to hire a therapist, and other times, we simply need to tell ourselves the truth. We might avoid the truth, dance around the truth, be terrified of the truth, or like to spin the truth, but the truth has a powerful reputation for getting us out of ruts. If you’re feeling stuck, start by telling the truth. When writers want to know what I mean by this, I take them back to The Infinity Prompt. What are the facts of the situation? What is the story you’re making up? How is this making you feel? You might find yourself getting lazy about telling the truth—saying things like, “I’m dying,” or “She is so unreasonable!” What if you got more specific? “What does unreasonable look like?” I might ask. Now they might say things like, “She won’t listen to anything I’m saying.” or even better, “She talked right over me.” Then I push them to get even more specific. How loud was her voice? Can you recreate the dialogue between the two of you? As we participate in this unfolding of truth, they realize something unexpected but fascinating. Trying to tell the truth about someone else is challenging and, in the end, uninteresting. The most interesting writing, the most interesting questions, the most interesting life comes when we’re able to tell the truth about _ourselves_. Who else but you could know the fascinating and often contradictory story of your life? Who else could know the truth of what it’s like to be Mormon and also a lesbian? Who else could know how you’ve coped with your mother’s drinking problem by latching onto men who drink too, so that you can stay distracted? Who else can know that you’re a pastor preaching one message on Sunday and living a totally different life the rest of the week? Only _we_ can know the truths that set us free. Years ago, after going through a heartbreaking divorce, I decided to write a book about it. The ex-husband in my life wasn’t a kind man, to say the least, and he had also been secretive about his indiscretions, so the idea of writing as a way to “tell the truth” appealed to me in a somewhat selfish way at first. I had spent years hiding his secrets—as well as hiding my own true feelings about him—and now, I figured, I could finally let it all hang out. So I did what I do, and I sat down and mapped out the story. Hundreds of instances of gaslighting and abuse. Infidelity. Questions that went unanswered. Questionable practices with money and business. All of it. And when I felt like I finally had it all nailed down, I booked myself a stay at a cabin to see if I could write it all down. The problem was, I started putting words on paper, and I immediately knew something was wrong. The story was boring. It was annoying, actually. I sounded like a whiny teenager complaining about how mean my boyfriend was. I mean, I’ll give myself some credit since I’d been through a significant trauma, but it was quickly becoming clear to me this was not a voice I wanted to claim. It wasn’t powerful or compelling in the slightest. But do you want to know my favorite part of the expressive writing process? The words we put on the page don’t have to stay the same. We get to decide how they transform. We get to expose more and more truth as we go on. I had to ask myself another question: What truth am I not telling? There’s a writing exercise I give to clients where you just literally list what’s true right now. It can be just a simple list, and none of the “truths” have to be connected. The only requirement is that the elements on the list have to actually be true. The truer the better. For example: - There are birds chirping over my head. - There’s a gentle “shush” of the ocean out my window. - I have a heaviness in my chest I can’t explain. - The day is bright, and I can still see the moon in the sky. This activity has a way of bringing you back into the present moment and reminding you what is true. As I coached myself through it, the list that formed in front of me made one thing glaringly obvious: I was terrified to tell the truth about myself. If I told the truth about myself, I’d have to explain why a twenty-eight-year-old woman walked down the aisle and married a man she did not love. That was a fascinating question, despite being a painful one to answer. It was a question I didn’t have the answer to just yet, but the writing drew me in. I knew even then that this truth was going to be the most powerful truth I could ever unlock. In the eight days that followed, I finished the story of the courtship, marriage, and divorce and was beginning to answer my own question about what makes a woman marry a man she does not love. Answering that question is what has led me here, married to a man I love deeply and expecting our first child. My husband is kind and gentle and supportive and loving and everything you want a husband to be. Even better, our partnership is without the familiar cycle of drama (that old neural pathway) that used to spin on repeat for me. Writing my story changed my life from the inside out. The truth, as terrible as it can be, has a remarkable reputation for getting us out of ruts. Truth cuts through the B.S. that’s getting in the way of the real you. Truth wakes us up and helps us pay attention. We can only know the truth about others if they choose to share it with us, but that’s okay. It’s the truth about us that transforms us. And writing is the tool that helps us to finally see it. --- Fallon, Allison. The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life (p. 97-107). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.