THE EXPERIENCE

IS NOT THE MEANING

 

If there's any misbelief, myth, misunderstanding, and false perspective that
influences just about everyone, it is the idea that your experiences
determine your meanings.  That's wrong.  It's wrong on many accounts.  And
it is an error that undermines the quality of life, the response-power of a
person, that denies a person joy and hope, and that misdirects how to cope
with experiences.

 

To give you an idea of how pervasive this deadly idea is, consider the
following statements.  Sadly, they are as common as they are erroneous and
misleading.

"Losing my dream job means I'll never find another one as good."

"I can't help but feel depressed, everyone does when they go through a
divorce."

"I can't help but being negative.  The way I was treated as a child has made
me the pessimistic person that I am today."

"You don't understand what being molested does to a person, it's something
that you don't just get over, you carry it with you all the days of your
life."

"What I want is to fall in love because then I would feel really good about
myself and have the high self-esteem that I have always wanted."

"We're social beings so needing approval is just built in, so don't tell me
that I need to have thicker skin and not take criticism so personal."

 

The hidden idea behind all of these is that your experiences determine your
life.  They determine your meanings, your emotions, and your responses.  And
what we can infer behind that is that you have very limited range of
responses when you have certain experiences.  If you have had X-given
experience, then you are pretty much fated to think, feel, speak, and act in
a certain way.  And to make that more explicit: you can't help yourself.
You have to feel depressed if you had a loss.  You have to feel suicidal if
you were publically humiliated.  You have to feel an insolvable grief if you
lost the love of your life.

 

If experience determines life, then we are all in a pretty desperate and
pretty much hopeless situation.  However, there's good news-experience does
not determine your response!  In fact, whatever happens, whatever experience
you have or go through-you have a whole range of ways to respond.  This is
worth writing down- whatever the experience, you have many choices about how
to interpret it.

 

The truth is that you have the power inside you to choose your response.
That's why we have the word, response-ability or response-power.  You can
determine what your experience means and how to perceive it.  You can draw a
whole range of different conclusions about the experience so that you can
give it the best one possible.  In this way, you have the power to fashion
your world, your thinking, your emoting, your coping, and your mastering of
your life situations. The power does not belong to the experience, to the
event-it belongs to you.  You are the meaning-maker.

 

Alfred Adler spoke to this subject in his book, Understanding Human Nature
(1927).  There he argued that the key is how a person interprets the
experience and that from that conclusion he creates his how "style of life"
which he will then project onto other experiences.

"We must remember that any experience may have many interpretations.  We
will find that there are no two people who will draw the same conclusion
from a similar experience.  This accounts for the fact that our experiences
do not always make us any cleverer." (1927, p. 20)

 

Whatever you have experienced is just that-an experience. What that
experience means, however, depends on you.  It depends on how you think
about it, perceive it, reason about it, draw conclusions from it, in a
word-how you interpret it and give it meaning.  And whatever meaning you
give it, that's the semantics that you have created and from that will come
your neurology, your emotions, your body sensations, your physiology, your
felt life.  Together we now have your neuro-semantic reality.

 

It is in this way that we say that you have a neuro-semantic nature.  And
the key is your semantics, your meaning-making powers.  That's what enables
you to live with hope and optimism, with resilience and determination, and
to make your life a work of art.

 If you are interested in making changes,

give me a call.

Marie 0411 515 802

 

 




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.