Your emotions are real. But is your interpretation true?

Your emotions are not necessarily a reflection of what is happening. They are signals of how your brain is interpreting what is happening.

Let me share something deeply personal.

My father was brutally stabbed and murdered just a few streets away from our home.

My mother, returning home from work one evening, was knocked down and killed by a car whose driver had been shot dead during a botched hijacking.

My eldest brother, with whom I shared a very close bond, disappeared. It took us two years to learn that he had died.

Three devastating losses. Three experiences that could easily have taken me into a very dark place.
I couldn’t change what had happened. I couldn’t bring them back.

But later, I began asking myself a different question: “What if I was the one who was supposed to die, but each of them had made the ultimate sacrifice for me?”

I chose to embrace that interpretation; not because I could prove it was true, but because it gave me a different way of looking at my life.

I stopped looking at my life only through the lens of what I had lost and began looking at it through the lens of what I still had to live for.

That shift changed my outlook on life.

And here’s something important: Your interpretation doesn’t have to make sense to everyone else. It must help you make sense of your experience.

This is what psychologists call cognitive reappraisal.

Research by Stanford psychologist James Gross demonstrates that changing how we interpret an experience can change our emotional response to it.

Reappraisal doesn’t erase pain, excuse wrongdoing, or change the facts. It changes the meaning we attach to an experience, and sometimes, that changes what becomes possible for us.