Changing Meaning for a Different Experience | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist

Anxiety is often created by the meaning we give things, and there was a great example of that recently with a lady that I was working with. She was about to get married. She was anxious, not uncommon by an about-to-be bride, but her anxiety was off the scale. And with the work that we did, what really came out was that she was giving the meaning to to marriage based on the experience of her parents' marriage, which was by all accounts not very harmonious. Her mum was perhaps very domineering. There was a lot of acrimony. And so she was thinking, if that's what marriage is, that's what I'm getting into. Is that what I want? She had attached meaning to that experience. However, All we did was help her recognise she wasn't her mum, her fiancé wasn't her dad, they had a completely different relationship that they were building. And so her marriage had every opportunity of going off in a very different direction, and even if she couldn't control that direction, they together could control how they developed their relationship by the meaning they chose to give to it. So think about the meaning you attach to things, and when you change the meaning, you can change your experience.