In Your Power

CHAPTER 7Psyche: From React to Reclaim

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

—Carl Jung, Psychoanalyst

Imagine you are driving your car in a shopping mall parking lot, and the driver behind you honks his horn. Immediately, without thinking, where do you go in your mind?

• What an impatient and aggressive jerk!
• I must be doing something that's getting in his way.
• Is he warning me about something?
• He's trying to catch the attention of his spouse leaving a store.
• He must have an emergency. I should get out of his way.

You don't really know why he honked his horn, but you create an explanation, or story, about why. That story is shaped by your experiences and will determine your response. If you think he's warning you, you'll scan the area around you to check you're not about to be hit by another car. Think he's a jerk, and you might curse him in the rearview mirror.

This storytelling we all do isn't some sort of pathology, it's part of our distinctive human ability to interpret our experiences and choose our responses, differentiating us from animals who act purely on instinct. But it's important because what endures from an event is not the actual facts of it but the story you tell about it.

Our human nature also leads us to turn our stories into “facts.” Chatting on the phone with your bestie as you leave the shopping mall, you might vent, “Some jerk took his stress out on me!” You're not likely to tell yourself, “That ...