The belief that one’s experiences are decisive for one’s meaning is a widespread misconception, myth, misunderstanding, and false perspective. That’s wrong.
It’s wrong on many accounts. In numerous ways, it’s not accurate. And it’s wrong because it robs people of happiness and hope, messes up their strategies for dealing with adversity, and ruins their quality of life overall.
The following statements give you an idea of how pervasive this deadly idea is. 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 Misconception That Your Experiences Determine Your Meaning
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 publicly humiliated. You have to feel an insolvable grief if you lost the love of your life.
If one’s life is truly determined by one’s experiences, then we are all in a dire and hopeless situation. The good news is that your reaction does not depend on your level of experience. Indeed, there is a wide variety of ways to react to any given situation or set of circumstances. The experience itself is not as important as the multiple interpretations you can give it.
You Have the Power to Choose Your Response
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)
The Key is Your Meaning-Making Powers
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.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- [Neurons] 2023 Neurons #3 THE EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE MEANING by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Executive Director, ISNS.
