War Stories….are they your teacher or anchor..

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about war stories—mine and everyone else’s.

I don’t hate them. I never have. They matter. They come from real places, real cost, real consequence. When shared with purpose, they teach restraint, humility, and respect for what violence actually takes from a human being.

But I’ve also seen how easily they can turn into a loop.

There was a time when I didn’t know who I was without my stories. They became proof. Credibility. Armor. I told myself I was honoring the past, but if I’m honest, I was often reliving it. Re-activating it. Feeding something inside me that didn’t want to be quiet.

That’s not strength.

That’s a lack of self-awareness.

I’ve sat through countless trainings as a cop where most of the day was war stories. Some from overseas. Some from the street. Some from decades ago. Stories can be powerful—but when they’re self-serving, when they reinforce identity instead of building capacity, they miss the point.

Experience without reflection is just memory.

Self-awareness changes the question.

Not what happened to me?

But how am I relating to it now?

I’ve learned that sometimes we don’t return to these stories because they still need to be told—we return to them because our nervous system recognizes the feeling. The certainty. The activation. The version of ourselves that once knew exactly who it was.

But growth asks something different.

It asks us to carry the past without becoming it.

To remember without reliving.

To teach without performing.

The strongest people I know aren’t the loudest storytellers. They’re the ones who can sit quietly with their past without needing to explain it. They know who they are now. They’re not negotiating with who they were.

I don’t want fewer stories.

I want more conscious ones.

Stories that serve purpose, not ego.

Stories that point forward, not backward.

Stories that end in responsibility, not applause.

The past is a teacher.

It was never meant to be a cage.

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