In part two of our self-narration exploration, Bridgette and Lindsey tackle another challenging component of how we tell ourselves stories: why did something happen to us? While understanding our past experiences can help us process what happened, constantly trying to find the “why” can cause the situation to shape who we are, instead of us shaping the memory. While our brain wants to find meaning and patterns for missing information, finding balance in what we know versus what we may never know is critical.

Key Takeaways

• When we make meaning out of who we are, what’s happened to us, and how we see others, changes to that perspective can feel like a disruption to our sense of self.
• Beyond our own interpretation of events, being misunderstood or mischaracterized because of our actions can add to the confusion of our role in a situation.
• For survivors of harm, restorative justice philosophy can play a pivotal role in their meaning-making, including meeting with or speaking with the person who caused them harm.
• From another perspective, when we’re supporting someone else who has experienced trauma, our first instinct to help them find meaning can be more for our own comfort.
• As the listener, it is our responsibility to allow someone time, understanding, and support as they decide whether or not to find meaning in the situation, not find it for them or push them toward that decision.

Resources Mentioned

• Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough”. New York: Avery, 2007.

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Welcome back to TraumaTies, where we believe trauma is a common thread of the human connection. I'm Bridgette Stumpf, here with my co-host, Lindsey Sliverberg

We spend a lot of time talking about what happens to us, but remembering an experience is only part of what our minds are doing. We're also trying to understand it. What did this mean? Why did it affect me this way? What does it change about what I believe, about other people, about the world, or about myself? That process is called meaning making, and it becomes especially important when something happens that doesn't fit the life we thought we were living.

A relationship ends that we thought would last. A career doesn't unfold the way we expected. Someone we trusted hurts us. Or an experience changes our sense of safety, identity, or what we thought we could count on.

Making meaning doesn't mean finding a silver lining. It doesn't require believing that everything happens for a reason or turning something painful into a lesson or a gift. Sometimes there isn't a satisfying explanation. Sometimes meaning making is simply figuring out how we hold what happened without letting it determine everything else that happens next. And the meaning we make it isn't fixed. The story we tell ourselves at 25 may not be the story we tell at 45.

We can learn something new, see an experience from another perspective, or realize that the story we were given about what happened was not really the whole story, even if our brain narrated it for us in the first place. So today we're talking about what it means to make meaning from what happened, how we integrate experiences that challenge what we believed, how the stories surrounding those experiences shape what they mean, and how we can allow something to remain part of our story without allowing it to write every chapter that comes after it.

And this is kind of a take two of our prior conversation that Lindsey and I have been having as we move into a discussion about making meaning from what has happened in our life. And I think the intro caveat here that we're not talking about toxic positivity or assuming that everything happens for a reason. I often shift that to things do happen and we are allowed to decide the meaning that we want to make for that particular experience.

So remembering is only one part of what we do with a particular experience we have. We also want to understand it. Meaning making is the process we go through of trying to understand what a particular event means within the larger framework of our lives. This becomes especially important when something happens that doesn't fit the life we thought we were living, or something we didn't expect. If you believed the people closest to you would always be there, and then sometimes those folks leave.

Or, you might have even thought that this challenges who you can actually trust based on how that experience happened. If you believed hard work would eventually lead to a certain kind of life and it doesn't, you may have to reconsider what success means to you. And if you believe that you knew exactly who you were until an experience changed your priorities or sense of safety, you may have to build a new understanding of yourself around what you've now learned.

Sometimes that process leads to a new perspective, and sometimes it takes years. And even sometimes there isn't a satisfying explanation or outcome at all. Meaning making doesn't require us to decide that something has happened for a particular reason or that something painful was actually a positive thing in our life. Sometimes the work is just figuring out how we live with the reality of what has happened in our lives.

And we're excited because I do think that Wicked gives us a particularly good example of–yes, that is the book, the play, and

Ha ha.

the movie. Wicked gives us such a great example of how much meaning can depend on the story we are given. And again, we are thinking about this both from the context of being told by someone else or an experience that our brain is remembering or reliving for us.

For the most part, when we think about the story, Elphaba is understood through a narration that has really already been decided for her. She's the wicked witch, the problem, the person everyone is supposed to fear. And I just have to pause here because there's an incredible amount of nuance in how other individuals' propaganda can shape narratives about other people that is really powerfully and profoundly done in this particular portrayal of the wicked witch. But when we are allowed to see more of her experience, the same events begin to mean something very differently.

Suddenly, the question isn't simply what happened, it's whose version of what happened have we been hearing? And that distinction matters in real life too. The story surrounding this experience can determine whether someone sees themselves as the person who caused the problem, the person who has survived it, the person who had no choice at all, or even the person who eventually found a way forward.

And this is bringing up for me, Lindsey, the coaching framework that we've been through as a team before that is really about this human instinct to create hero, victim, and what's the third one...

Villain.

And villain, yeah. Well, I'm like, what is that other terrible one? The wicked witch. and how

Yeah.

naturally we fall into these dynamics just in our daily lives. And for survivors of trauma, meaning making can become a part of moving from an experience that happened to them towards an understanding of how they want to live after. And it is very common in our experience for individuals to even describe surviving trauma as life before and life after.

That doesn't mean minimizing what has happened or forcing hope or some sort of happy ending onto what it means to be in the life after. It means allowing that experience to have a place in the story without allowing it, as we said, to really control every chapter that is narrated from here on after.

So the interesting thing that's coming up for me here is and I've shared this in other episodes, but at 27 I ended up having a fairly, what was supposed to be routine heart procedure to get an ablation, if anyone is familiar with that. And ended up with a pacemaker ICD, so a, an internal defibrillator, and a potential diagnosis of a of a heart problem.

And what has always been interesting to me about that experience is that it really rocked the way the story I told myself about who I was, mostly because everybody in my family, my mom, dad, and sister had all had health problems at some point, up until I, you know, I had this heart procedure. And so in my mind, I was the I was the strong one.

I was the one who wasn't sick, who didn't have any health problems. And that narrative for me was actually probably the harder thing to deal with coming out of my procedure than anything else, because it was the story I told myself. It was the meaning I made out of not having had those experiences and what my role was in my family. and it's just making me think a lot about what, what you tell yourself and how you view yourself can really shape the way you experience it.

And I want to just double down on this because what you're describing is grief. And we

Mm-hmm.

often think about the experience of grief as loss in terms of death, right? Like a physical loss. And grief can be a psychosocial loss. This is one that I really love to talk about. I think it's particularly relevant around an identity shift because psychosocial loss means the loss of hopes and dreams.

And if your identity was in my family, I'm going to be the healthy, strong one that can support everyone else navigating these health issues. And all of a sudden, you're confronted with, I need help too. I'm also going, like, I can't be that for everyone else. I'm gonna need that. That can really, I think, shift someone's identity in a way that profoundly changes the way they move through the world. And we very rarely acknowledge these identity shifts as grief. And I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that that's really what that experience is about.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm, I'm curious, you know, sort of thinking through that experience for me, but maybe also from your own experience, what do you think happens psychologically when someone can't make sense of something that happened to them? Like why can the need

Mm.

to understand an experience sometimes become almost as consuming as the experience itself?

I'm having so many thoughts here. So I'm really hoping that they will connect at the end of this. So I think there's a couple of ways that you can unpack this question. One is most people don't realize we actually have a part of our brain that is designed to fill in gaps when our brain feels like information is missing or doesn't make sense, right? So we don't realize we have this invisible part of our brain when something is, reasonably so, unable to be understood, right?

Because of the depth of the impact of that experience, the way that it changes us. And the brain is constantly trying to fill in those gaps and make sense of it. And that I think can be really frustrating when other people are trying to offer perspectives that don't align with the way the brain is trying to fill in those gaps.

I also when was sort of thinking about what this can feel like, I've shared that one of the hardest experiences for me as you're describing this kind of identity shift being really impactful on your life, one of the hardest experiences for me is a feeling of being misunderstood by someone, especially if they're, from my perspective, misunderstanding my intentions or my goals or my intent. And that's honestly probably why I relate to The Wicked Witch so much because, and I I've loved this book, I've loved this play.

Anyone that knows me, this is a story that is so beautifully told about so many present-day issues we're grappling with, but over history, this idea identity that we can really bring people together if we give them a, a common enemy. That has been a very effective strategy. And what I love about this story is the common enemy in this context is actually the person trying to do the right thing who constantly gets narrated and framed as being bad or wrong because they're trying to make people see the truth of what is happening.

And so often in our culture, whether it's a toxic environment, whether it's social movements, the people trying to name the truth, right? Especially truth to power, are framed as the problem. We see this in toxic family dynamics, right? The person trying to set boundaries is the problematic one, the unloving one. And so I think there's something tied up in all of this about how much of a double injury it feels like when not only are you having a negative experience, but the way someone is perceiving your intention or understanding how you're experiencing it kind of causes this second layer of harm.

And I think what that does for a brain that's trying to make sense of it is it can have a compounding effect that maybe we don't always understand.

And I think I've tried, Lindsey, you can keep me accountable on this as I've gotten older and lived a little bit more life, to really get curious about not only the story I'm telling myself about how I remember something in my own righteousness about where I was placed in that particular moment and event, but also getting curious about other people's perspectives and understandings and intentions so that hopefully together, collectively as a community, we can fill in those gaps, you know, of understanding and making meaning out of things happen, not just from our singular perspective or view.

I am now thinking about the old saying curiosity killed the cat and how that is such an interesting thing to unpack that we've

Mm.

actually taught kids to not be curious, right? We are teaching people to not live in a space of curiosity. And I don't actually know. I'm very interested. We'll have to

Yeah, why? Where does that saying come from? Do we know? We might have to research this.

follow up and find out. But

Put it in the show notes, just flagging that.

Yeah.

But it is it is, you know, a lot of what you hear about like how to be good leaders and how to be in spaces where maybe you have some power or authority does come from a place of curiosity, right? And so like we were talking about in a prior episode, that it's much more about whose story are we telling? Not, you know, what happened.

Ooh, that's and like yeah, think about Wicked.

Right, yes. and I was not as I didn't have the sort of following of Wicked until Bridgette and I went to see it a couple months ago, the play and–musical that's probably the more accurate name for it–musical.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I loved it. I I didn't have the sort of background framing of the importance of the story prior to seeing it, which left me really in awe of the way that they tell that story and to Bridgette's point, how from whose perspective and what that person is trying to do really matters.

Yeah, perspective just changes everything. It completely shifts.

And it's so interesting when we think about this idea through the question, you know, why can the need to understand an experience sometimes become almost consuming as the experience itself? Like your question about what is happening when we can't make sense of something, we've seen this before and we we call it this kind of concept of getting stuck. We've actually seen it and, and I've experienced it myself.

But when someone feels like they are misunderstood in this profoundly impactful event that has happened to them and they can't make sense of it, their brain can actually get stuck on trying to understand the meaning and on particular details. And there's really interesting psychological tools like validation and peer support that we can use to help validate the feeling of where they're stuck. But it really does come from this, almost like inherent experience of I don't understand why this happened and the why. And we've talked

Mm-hmm.

about this before, like, why is not a real time, right? The

Yeah.

why something happened and the, the fixation that so many survivors of profoundly painful traumas, loss, and grief have and getting stuck in the why part. And I really do think that is the brain's mechanism of trying to survive something that is just not supposed to ever really be felt and understood.

Yeah, was actually having this conversation with somebody in my life the other day where they've had a deeply hurtful experience and they've been spending a lot of time sort of thinking that through about why it happened, why would this person do that to them? And I've tried really hard to stay in a place of validation because, you know, as we talked about, like the why's not really gonna matter. Like the why's not gonna make it feel better in a lot of ways. And–but their brain is in, in that space where it's trying to make sense of why somebody would do that. And so not knowing,

Mm.

knowing that they don't feel like they're able to move through it in this moment.

I have no understanding at all. So if you are someone who's a neuroscientist, you can check me on this if this is a thing. But I'm realizing that when, even like, within the context of work when we're going through something really stressful or maybe like experiencing a third party as pretty harmful, I get a little fixated on the rationalization around their behavior. Like, why would they do that? What are they getting out of this? How does this benefit them? And I'll do this to you, right, Lindsey? Where like

Yeah, yeah.

I'm really trying to unpack their motivations and like understand–and I think just, as we're in this discussion, a part of me is wondering if that's like almost an overcharge in my frontal lobe, right? Like going into the rational part of my brain, being in that space creates some level of comfort that I think is different than our limbic system when we're just sort of in this automated stress response.

And so I'm curious to our listeners if this over-rationalization of trying to understand the why behind a harmful experience or moment, even when it's low risk, like not a trauma experience, but maybe yeah, like a more of a kind of like challenging stakeholder decision, right? That that you have to adhere to within the context of, of your employment, how many people go to over-rationalization and trying to process the why as almost like a coping strategy.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, that makes sense, right? I think for most folks, it feels like it's gonna give you an answer to

Mhm.

something, right? We see this a lot with survivors of trauma that we work with who end up going through a restorative justice process and they wanna have a conversation with the person who harmed them. Some of it really is focused around the why did you do this? And I think the

It's great point.

challenging part of that is like there's never gonna be a good answer to that, right?

There's never going to be an explanation that's going to take away the hurt and harm that an individual caused. But because our brain is looking to fill in the places where we don't know or we don't have information, maybe it feels helpful to have that.

And the validation, right? The validation

Mm-hmm.

of how painful or harmful the experience was. And Lindsey, you're actually like really skilled at this. I would put you up there at like the best I've ever seen in terms of actually practicing validation techniques, especially if you yourself don't know that experience.

So when you think about your work with survivors and what we do to support survivors of trauma, how do we offer support to someone who's in this meaning-making process after a harmful experience, really trying to help them understand this–the making of meaning of what happened–without deciding for them what the meaning should be? What does that process look like for you?

I mean, I, I think that's hard. Brene Brown right talks a lot about judgment and how much everybody likes it. And I think one of the really challenging pieces when you're trying to support somebody going through a hard time is not giving them or trying to give them a meaning or to make meaning out of their experience. We see this a couple of different ways.

You know, again, I think when you think about it like Elphaba it's the intention is good and the harm that it can cause to try to tell somebody who's just experienced a loss, like, this was meant to happen, or it was so-and-so's will. This is, you know, you're gonna find purpose out of something horrible that's happened to you. It's more of a comfort to the person providing the, like saying the thing, not to the actual person who's experienced

Mm.

it. And we have a lot of discomfort in sitting in the muck with someone.

So the way that I always think about it is like it's not for me to make meaning out of it, right? I'm not the expert in that person's life. I don't know what this means to them or how this potential trauma or harm has impacted them. So my job is to validate, man, that's really hard, or you know, identify the positives; you showed up and you were able to seek services, you were able to do XYZ, you were able to get up and still take care of your kids and go to work, all these things.

But it's not for me to say you're gonna take this experience and turn it into something or this happened because XYZ. that is much more about the person saying it than it is the person who experienced it.

Well, to take this full circle back to Inside Out, which we mentioned on kind of part one of this conversation, it is really interesting to see the practice of validation and, and meaning making. And this is in the original movie where Bing Bong's wagon gets pushed over the cliff. And we've used this in some of our trainings, but Bing Bong is really having an attachment to the loss of the wagon. And on the surface, it's the loss of a thing, right?

So sort of in the context of like that so psychosocial physical loss of hopes and dreams and once Sadness is able to just validate like the sadness of the loss it's really about the representation that in that individual wagon had to his relationship with the main character Riley and it's so beautiful how validation is almost like, it's the key that unlocks kind of the, the bigger what's the word I'm looking for...hope chest?

What do people call those things? You know, when you want the things you store or store all your memories in. The key that unlocks that is it called a hope chest? That's what I think my mom

I think that sounds right.

called it. Yeah. And once you unlock that and open it up through the technique of validation, like that's really hard. You're sad about that. It was really the thing that unlocked, like, this is more about the loss of my relationship with Riley and how this reminds me of that.

So, it's just an interesting way of thinking about some of the tools we can use in our own lives and they're not natural and we don't practice them, right? We don't practice sitting in the muck with someone. So, you know, if based on the role that you play as a listener in your work or even in your personal life, if you're interested in learning what those tools can look like, we have a really great resource for you. And we would love to share more with you about what that can look like in practice. And Lindsey does a really great job of some of the, those concrete examples of how you can do that.

Okay,

so to bring this full circle, I did look up what curiosity killed the cat

Ha ha

meant. The original phrase phrasing of it was care, care'll kill the cat. And back then that meant worry or sorrow rather than curiosity. It changed to curiosity later.

So the original intent was to warn against stress and seek instead of too many, asking too many questions. So it, I mean, they both they both sort of work for what we've been talking about today, but that's so fascinating to me that it was actually more about the why. The why did this happen? Why did this thing, right?

Yeah.

The stress and the needing of validation rather than the actual curiosity.

Ooh.

Yeah, I feel like that feels maybe more applicable than

You're right.

the curiosity. Wow, that's interesting. So here you are, two birds, one seed today, learning a little bit about where that saying came from, on top of some, some strategies to think about for validation. So

And we got to t to talk about one of your favorite all-time stories.

Yes!

I could dive so much deeper on the nuggets in Wicked. There are just so many beautiful threads there. And I love that we had an opportunity to talk about how important perspective is and how it really shifts the way we view stories about others and really about ourselves.

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