The Power of Significance... And the Dangers

I've been reading a book called "How to Stop the Pain" by Dr. James B. Richards. I wasn't expecting much from it, but it has actually had some pretty good insights. And one that has particularly resonated with me is his concept of significance. I will try to give you the J-Notes version.

The main premise is that we magnify our difficulties in dealing with things based on the significance we attach to them. Say you see your co-workers standing around, laughing and talking. You approach and they fall silent. They aren't cold, but you feel like something is off. Later on, you may conclude they don't like you, or were gossiping about you. You take these speculations and get all worked up. Turns out, they knew your birthday was coming up, and were planning to take you out for lunch, and even baking you a cake.

This is a trite example, but there are many cases large and small​ where we aren't quite sure what is going on, and we make a judgment that leads us to dark places. This is what the author writes:

"...it is not the intensity of the offense that determines the pain; rather, it is always the significance we attach that determines our pain. This being the case, one person could have an extremely intense experience with very few destructive results, while another could go through an apparently harmless experience and, because of the significance attached to it, have devastating results."

This is so true! I think of who have gone through so much more than I, and still are vibrant and positive. And I have known people who couldn't enjoy anything, because they ran everything through a cynical, jaded filter. The extent to which we personalize and magnify is the extent to which we will struggle to resolve it.

Not everything can be shrugged off. But some things must be, for the sake of our own well-being. I find this both daunting and liberating. Something that seemed like the end of the world at the time must be re-evaluated with the passage of time, when there is more clarity and less emotion involved. Note, this doesn't mean white-washing history. It doesn't mean blocking out hurts. But it does mean that we do not carry the rawness from the event with us forever.

I once rented my home out to a family who initially presented as solid and upstanding. The husband and wife had a falling out and she abruptly left with the kids. This situation (in the words of Ron Burgundy, Anchorman) "really got out of hand fast" (see Anchorman Post-Fight Scene). He stopped paying his rent (first on-time, then stopped altogether) and he fell into the bottle. He trashed my home, and instead of trying to work with me to get caught up, ended up compounding the situation by forcing me to incur court expenses to evict him. It turned into a mess, and it bothered me for a while. However, now I think if I bumped into that guy on the street, I could be civil, and even kind. It was tremendously stressful at the time, but now, it's just something that happened, and life has rolled on.

I'm sure many of you have much more painful things in your past, and this post isn't meant to compete for saddest story. However, it is meant to encourage you, to challenge you to look at things with a different perspective. After all, things in the rear view are supposed to get smaller and smaller the further in the distance they get.