More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud discovered how the memories of bad things that happened during our childhoods can sometimes return to haunt us, messing up our lives.
But for Carl Jung this made no sense.
He realised that this way of interpreting things turns us into helpless victims of a past that cannot be changed. But everything in nature is a part of evolution. And if this kind of thing happens so often, to so many people, as it so surely does, then surely it must bring some kind of evolutionary benefit.
What might that benefit be?
Jung realised that different people get upset about different things: an event that upsets one person might have no effect on someone else. And different people will also often interpret the same event in different ways.
This means that, in a sense, we each choose what we get upset about: something happens, we interpret what it means, and then we choose which of our interpretations we get upset about.
And what all this means is that what upsets us is actually a gift of gold.
Because in a world filled with messages telling us who we should be, how we should live, what we should buy, how we should vote and so on, the things that upset us most show us what we truly care about the most. What we get upset about reveals what matters most to us. And once we know what that is, then we can start to rebuild it, in ourselves and in the world.
No matter what anybody else might say, the things that trigger our emotions remind us of our priorities. They show us what we care about, who we are, who we want to become.
And then, as Carl Jung said, we can realise that:
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
What Freud interpreted as a ‘problem’ is actually an opportunity. The memories of bad things that happened in our pasts are simply signposts, pointing to what matters most to us. And once we understand this, then we can transform our emotions and use them to inspire us to move through this time of change with passion, energy, and enthusiasm.
This is another step to becoming antifragile: using the changes around us to make us stronger and more inspired, and helping to build what matters most to us.
Can you think of something that upset you recently? Did it paralyse you? Or did it bring you new clarity about what matters most to you, and inspire you to do what you can to build that?
The Churning, Inner Leadership is a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
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(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)