How to Make Meaning by Managing Your Memories

To get closer to your core self, your truest self, you need to connect with yourself at a deeper level. This will generate more self-awareness and knowing. This knowing, in turn, will be your guiding light as you move forward into the next phase of your journey.

But to gain that deeper self-awareness, you must explore the way you make meaning in your life. In your conversations with yourself and with others. How you express what’s really happening, how you genuinely feel and why you make the choices you do. Meaning making helps us respond to others and situations rather than react. It will help you understand how you experience your life, how you can let go of unresolved issues and past experiences.

Manage your memories or let your memories manage you

We all have a choice. You can allow your memories to manage you or you can learn to manage your memories. Learning to manage your thoughts, rather than be managed by them is a new programme we all need to install in our software. It allows us to see the truth behind the emotion. It also stops us from storytelling, exaggerating, adding two and two together and making five.

This allows us to really understand what is happening in that moment. It helps us make meaning of the experience and realise that yes, we may have experienced something similar in our past. But the experience you are experiencing now is completely new. It is happening right now, not then. We will not experience the experience the same. Why? Because we have evolved and who we are now is not who we were then.

When you allow yourself to not be led and controlled by your thoughts or memories, you step out of your drama triangle. The choices each of us makes are what differentiates one person from another. Those choices, based on past actions, create memories and then prompt future actions. The seeds of these memories and desires are stored at the level of the soul, but we can choose to plant new seeds – download a new software.

Perception VS reality

Here is an exercise to help you make meaning of your feelings past and present. Consider the below questions and whilst answering, please make sure you practise compassion. Remember to speak/write your truth and take your time to determine what is your perception versus what is your reality.

• When was the last time you got caught up in your emotional drama?
• What was the trigger point and how did you behave, what did you do, say and feel? Capture each role if you experienced them (victim, persecutor and rescuer).
• What is your typical default role?
• Does this have to be your reality?
• What perceptions are no longer serving you well?
• What is your reality? Go to what you know – not what you think or feel – what do you know?

So, the next time you notice your perception is clouding the reality of a situation, try to make meaning of your feelings first before getting caught up in your own emotional drama and psychological game. Remember that if we don’t take time to make meaning of the situation, our memory will reintroduce how we felt in the past and will, for sure, mix it with how we feel in the now.

You can choose to be in control of your memories; they do not need to control you.