Chapter 3 Who Am I Really?
Session 3: Getting to the Core: Who Am I Really?
Report On Assignments
Objective: By the end of this session each participant will understand the importance of and be able to separate events from the meanings we place on those events.
“Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional.”
There is an old Taoist story about a poor farmer whose lone horse runs away. His neighbors say, “What terrible misfortune to have your horse run away!”
If you were a poor Chinese farmer, and your lone horse ran away, what would you say about it? Write it on the following line: __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What do your neighbors say? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The farmer, however, is unsure of the events meaning. He shrugs his shoulders and continues with his work. The next day his horse returns accompanied by several other wild horses. His neighbors say, “What great good fortune you have!”
What do you say about the return of the horses? Write it on the following lines:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What do your neighbors say? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The farmer, however, is unsure of the events meaning. He shrugs his shoulders and calls his sons to coral and break in the wild horses. The next day, his eldest son, while taming one of the wild horses, falls off it and breaks his leg, making it impossible to help the family in the harvest. “A terrible misfortune,” say his neighbors.
What do you say about the farmer’s son breaking his leg? Write it on the next line: __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What do your neighbors say? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The farmer, however, chooses to put no meaning to the event and shrugs his shoulders as if to say, “Good News, Bad News, who knows?” Next day, a vicious and selfish warlord sweeps through the area, taking away each families eldest son to fight his selfish and bloody war but leaving the farmer’s son because of his broken leg.
What meaning do you place on this turn of events now?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What do your neighbors think?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“What great good fortune for you”, say his neighbors. And so it goes. As a news reporter on our own life we could be like the farmer – observing the facts, day by day, without concluding whether it will be good or bad news for anyone in particular. Creating a working description, but as a famous investigative cop once said, “Strictly the facts, mam, strictly the facts.”
What have you learned from this exercise and how can you apply it to your life? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
All things are present – we can only create in the now.
It is our presently held meaning of events that ties us down or sets us free.
The parts of our psychological history that make a difference now do not reside in the past.
If we are not victims but instead producers of our emotional problems, and if it is right now that we are producing them, then we can eliminate the problems at their source. “Bonds That Make Us Free.”
The REAL suffering:
Comes from what you choose to believe and think about what has occurred in the past.
What other people think of you is none of your business.
Misery and resentment take energy, participation and indulgence.
Since you are the one thinking it, you are the one responsible for how you interpret it. When you don’t stop using disempowering contexts, it is not because you can’t; it is because you are continuing to look for justification of your misery, resentment and unforgiving attitudes. What your response to them is, including refusing to be annoyed or hurt, that is your business.
When you choose to allow the actions of others to negatively affect you, you are joining together with them to create your own misery.
Some time ago a 35 year old female client of came to my office claiming that she had just discovered that she had been molested when she was 8 years old.
“How did you just discover this after all these years?” I asked her.
“My neighbor told me,” was her replay. Of course I needed to know the context of her discovery. She went on to tell me that she was describing a childhood incident to a neighbor which involved being fondled in a closet by a school custodian when she was in the 4th grade. “When I described the incident to my neighbor she said,, “You were molested.” I asked her how she had viewed this incident all these years prior to attaching the label of molestation to the incident. She said. “For all these years I thought he was just being kind.” Interestingly enough is the face that the incident didn’t cause her any problem until she attached the negative meaning to it.
Another client told me he was stupid. When I asked him to tell me how he had come to that irrational conclusion. He told me that on this 12th birthday he was riding in the back seat of the family car and his mother turned around, looked him in the eye and said, “You are stupid.” The meaning he attached to that event was that his mother said it, so it must be true.
I encouraged him to check it out. He took the challenge and called his mother who actually did remember the incident, but not the same way my client did. When she heard his explanation of the event she laughed and said, “That is not the way it happened at all. When I said “You are stupid,” I was talking to your father.
While talking about the principle of separating Events and Meaning a one group member piped up and said, “It had nothing to do with me.” When I asked him to explain he went back to a painful memory of his past where his father spanked him on a daily basis with a paddle made from a tractor tire. The beating only stopped at age 14 when the boy growing towards manhood got big enough that he wouldn’t let it happen any longer. His flash of insight was, “I thought my father beat me because I was flawed. I just realized that he beat me because he was crazy. I just happened to get in the way.” This newly assigned meaning did not change the painful past but the past was gone. What it did change was the misery this man felt from the continual feeling of shame that came from blaming himself for his father’s behavior.
Events do not determine meanings. The event and the meaning assigned are two separate entities. Which of these caused me the most grief, the event or the meaning I assigned to it? When we are able to separate what actually happened from our “story” of what happened, our interpretation, we discover that much of what we considered already determined, given and fixed, may in fact not be that way. It only existed in own minds. What is the difference between events and their assigned meaning? Which has the most power to influence your life?
As a man thinketh so is he.
Who we are is the sum total of the meaning of all the events to which we assigned meaning in our lives. In other words, I created myself out of my own thoughts. These are thoughts that I made up. I am nothing more than an illusion which I myself created.
What happens when I stop thinking? I go away. A man or woman is literally what he/she thinks, his/her character being the complete sum of all his/her thoughts.
If you never again thought about yourself the way you thinking about yourself you cease to be who you think you are.
So who are you? Who would you be if you gave up all the stories of the past? Who could you become if you were no longer were who you have been.
Give up the old images. Experience what it would be like to let them go.
Assignment: Notice where you assign meaning to events in your life. Notice if they are empowering or disempowering. Think about “no meaning”, creating nothing out of the event, and like the farmer return to just “what is so”.
This will assist you in returning to your true, original self concept. Distinguish what self images you are determined to hold on to justify your misery.
For more information on separating events from meaning refer to “The Stockdale Principle” in the appendix.
Boxed Thinking:
In the box on the left, list an event from your past that really has you stuck. You may feel it has caused you real emotional hurt and pain. In the box on the right, write down the meaning you assigned to this event. (There are extra boxes provided for discovery in more than one event.)
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Event:____________________________________________________________________________
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Meaning I have assigned to that: __________________________________Other possible meanings _______________________________________________________________________________________________ |
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Event:___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
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Meaning I have assigned to that: __________________________________Other possible meanings _______________________________________________________________________________________________ |
The truth of the matter is, my past is empty and meaningless. There is not one thing that has ever happened to me that I didn’t attach an arbitrary meaning to. I made myself up out of fantasy and so did you. As I mentioned before pain is inevitable but misery is optional. Pain comes from the fact that the events of life are hard. Real misery comes from the fact that we make up meanings to interpret those events which are not accurate. One of my clients one day in and said her father, her sole loving support in the world had just passed away and her husband, who was an alcoholic, just relapsed. I inquired as to the meaning she had attached to these events. She said, “This must mean that God hates me.” How miserable might anyone be who believed that God had turned his back on them? We looked for another meaning we could assign. We came up with, “These events might mean that God loves me and has given me the opportunity to discover his power in my life. We are meaning making machines and all meaning is arbitrary.
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