Rise Above the Story; Free Yourself from Past Trauma and Create the Life You Want
Karena Kilcoyne
BenBella Books (2024)

How to acknowledge the truth about yourself, embrace the strengths, and eliminate the weaknesses

Here is Karena Kilcoyne’s first headnote, quoting Muzuta Masahide, a seventeenth-century (Edo period) Japanese poet and samurai who studied under Matsuo Bashō: “My barn having been burned down, I can now see the moon.”

If I understand  this observation (and I may not), Masahide suggests that once Metaphor #1  (the barn) has been eliminated as a barrier, he can then see Metaphor #2 (the moon). Presumably both Masahide and Kilcoyne  was/is aware of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” That ancient story affirms the great importance of recognizing the source of light (i.e. ultimate pure truth) rather than than relying on the shadows it evokes (i.e. imperfect, incomplete, perhaps even corrupt distortions of truth).

What is a person’s story and why should some people “rise above’ (i.e. modify or replace) that story with another? Part of the answer is revealed as she recalls the details of the story she formulated after a past trauma. It shaped her perspectives on reality and limited her life. Finally, she acknowledges story’s insufficiencies as a “victim mindset” and formulated a more appropriate mindset that enabled her to create the life she really wanted.

Many people who read Rise Above the Story will recognize similarities between their lives now and the life Kilcoyne describes in Part 1, Chapters 1-5.  Once she sets the table, she focuses her attention in Part 2 on (a) HOW people get “tangled up” in a self-limiting (perhaps self-defeating) story, (b) HOW that story takes ov as aner their life, and (c ) HOW they extract their “true self” and leverage that new story to create the life they really want.  In the three final chapters that comprise Part 3,  Karena Kilcoyne fine-tunes the mindset and additional applications that she has so carefully explained expreviously. Details are best revealed within the narrative, in context.

These are among her concluding thoughts: “Rising above our story is not linear, and it is never, [begin italics] ever [end italics] a one and done. Unfortunately, the cruelist stories are the hardest to rid ourselves of. From time to time, they’ll poke around, looking to stir up trouble. There will also be multiple layers  to rising and plenty of opportunities to rise above new stories. Instead of being fearful, we must look at each situation as an opportunity to grow and achieve what we most desire.”

In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, it would be a good idea to keep in mind that the Chinese word for crisis (危机) has two meanings: peril and opportunity. If your current story prevents you from rising above it, create one that does. Most human limits are self-imposed.

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Here are two suggestions to keep in mind while reading Rise Above the Story: Highlight key passages, and, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to questions posed within the “Now It’s Your Turn” sections that conclude Chapters 2-11.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.