Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world
&quot;What happens is not what happens. What happens is the story that we tell ourselves about what happens.&quot;<p>A contrived example:<p>Adult is home with parents. One of the parents asks her to clean up her dishes. She reacts quickly with a knee-jerk &quot;I was going to do it! Ugh!&quot;.<p>What happened was that the parents wanted to clean up the table.<p>However, since the adult has this shifting narrative in her head about &#x27;my parents don&#x27;t treat me with respect&#x27;, she immediately interpreted the simple request as <i>proof</i> or <i>evidence</i> that &#x27;they are not treating me with respect&#x27; and emotionally reacted. Kind of like a vicious circle.<p>It&#x27;s kind of like when we have a bad day, we can interpret it as everything is conspiring against us. The thing is that we are <i>interpreting</i> what happens to us all the time. It doesn&#x27;t have to be a single origin story&#x2F;root cause like the author of the book in the article states.<p>The way to look forward is to actually start taking proactive actions towards the story that you want. Since we don&#x27;t exist without other people, you cannot simply spit affirmations into a mirror or make a vision board. You must put it out there with the people who are entangled in your reality. For the adult in this example, it would be something like being honest with her parents (something like non-violent communication) and telling them how she feels they are treating her without respect and working with them to &quot;co-create&quot; a new reality.<p>Note: This is not my thought. It comes from a personal development organization that starts with &#x27;L&#x27; and ends with the letter before &#x27;l&#x27;. The extent of my involvement was going to a weekend seminar on invitation from a friend.