Tragedy or Comedy

Well that sucked! (Or did it?)

I often speak about how our emotions are the result of our interpretations. But what do you do when a whole pile of challenges happen together? How do you interpret that? My friend, who is in private practice, recently lost a major client. The business just went away. Actually that is something that is hitting several of my very close friends. Certain parts of the economy are in some kind of a lull and for the moment, the need for external contractors is lowered. But on top of that, this one friend incurred a major property expense that wasn’t covered by insurance and which was way more than the emergency budget this person had on hand. And then their car was hit, which, though covered by insurance, just felt like adding insult to injury, as the saying goes.

My friend called me and said that she was working on finding a better interpretation. But what I heard in that was that she was trying to re-interpret the events themselves, and that is not the point. Stuff like that happens. The world and the universe are chaos machines and rather indiscriminate as to where, when, and to whom that chaos happens. The interpretation is something other than that. What we mean by having an interpretation is making those events mean something about life, or about you.

The biggest example I can think of happened on September 11th back in 2001. What happened on that day was that a small number of individuals used airplanes to cause destruction and that resulted in many people’s death. There is no way one could see that as anything other than it was – a tragic day. But what was interesting to me was that nearly everyone I knew had a different meaning for that day. Some lost loved ones and their lives were changed. Others nearly escaped, but some of those felt blessed and became spiritual while others I knew who worked in the towers and lived were imbittered and became hateful afterward. Some people went immediately to sign up for the military to go and fight whoever it was who did this, while others said the United States might have deserved it because of how much we had meddled in other countries lives.

The event was the same, but the personal interpretations differed radically, one from the other. That is what we are talking about when dealing with the interpretations – what is the meaning we affix to any situation or event? Our minds are meaning-makers. That is just its job, much like our stomach’s job is to digest food. So when something happens or when we do something and cause a result (liked or disliked), our mind simply affixes a meaning to it. What we need to become aware of is how and why it makes certain assessments of these events and results.

The answer is simply that meaning is created by comparing the current event or experience to the vast amount of stored information (including previous meanings and interpretations) in our heads. Over time we have formed a kind of meta-interpretation of life, the world around us and of ourselves. If your meta-meaning for life is that life sucks and then you die, events will be interpreted either as confirmations or exceptions to that belief. But the interpretation will always stay consistent with the meta-belief. Our minds will want to “be right” (if you will) about its major conclusions and will hold on to that by adding more evidence until or unless we actively work to change that meta-interpretation.

Sometimes, events occur in life that are so impactful that they can dislodge our long-held belief system but most of the time we will need to do the work to change them. Of course, if your core belief is that life is good and love conquers all, you might not want to change that filter. But when the belief system seems to continually steer your thinking and feeling down a path of pain and discouragement, it warrants investigation.

That is where emotional awareness and emotional intelligence come into play. By becoming more aware of our feelings and emotions as the results of our belief system and thought patterns, we can readily see what is happening in the internal dialog and decide if or how we may want to change that pattern. It may not be easy – the mind can be stubbornly addicted to its “conclusions” about life – but it is possible. Many of my books have pointed to the ways in which this can be accomplished. My most recent book, Learning To Feel addresses emotions and their role in discovering the belief system. Typhoon Honey deals with the tools of transformation and how to employ them effectively. And Wrestling The Angel focuses in on the role of what is called “the dark night of the soul,” those powerful events and experiences that totally uproot our beliefs and change them permanently. Forgive me for what sounds like plugging my books, but the truth is that I write in order to help others make the changes and pepper each with my own experience both personally and as an executive coach over the past thirty-five years.

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Kris Girrell ia an author and psychologist who has turned his 40 years of consulting and practice into writing books on the topics of emotional intelligence and personal transformation. You can find him at www.innerworks-consulting.com.