Dallas Bragg argues that power comes from choosing your response to events, not from the events themselves. He uses a wedding invitation scenario to show how two people can interpret the same rejection completely differently, one rationally and one by spiraling into self-victimization. The shift from victim to creator happens when you stop letting circumstances write your story.
The guiding practice for every day is to step into and claim the power you have over your life. Stop. We gotta move from victim to creator. And you can either be totally responsible for your life or be totally the victim of it. The transformation of your life occurs and you start creating your reality because you're responding to life in a more self-aware, curious way. Instead of blaming everybody else. Claiming your power is power over your response to life. Having full responsibility is about how you choose to respond to every life experience. And I'm sure you've heard me talk about relapse ad nauseam at this point, or if you're new here, let me tell you what my stance is. Relapse, using drugs in and of itself is not a bad thing. It's neutral. Crystal meth in and of itself is just a chemical. It's not bad or good. There's no value judgment here or subjective assignment. We decide. You're in charge. You claim your power by deciding and assigning meaning to your life experience. We write the narrative here. We are the writer, producer, director, and actor of our own movie. We get to decide the plotline. But many of us behave as if somebody else is writing our story, writing our plot for us. Why is it everybody else? Why did they, how did they make me feel this way? Why, why is this happening? Why did they do that? Somebody else is giving you a narrative of your own life. If you don't write the narrative, then we are not claiming our power. We create, we create our reality. You've heard of that, right? Creating a reality is choosing how you respond to life. So let's, here's an example. Let's say that you and I were both Not invited to a wedding of our close friends. Your response to that could be, they must not have had space for everybody, right? Or maybe they ran outta money for the reception or any number of responses. That might how you, that might be how you respond to it. My response based on my story could be, I start spiraling. I'm hurt, I'm offended, and immediately filling in the blank and making up story. They never really liked me anyway. And then I'll start going through a litany of reasons and recounting all through our friendship of all the ways they've showed me over the years that prove I'm right, that prove that they never liked me. And I'll get myself worked up and probably send the nasty texts and damage the relationship when all along, perhaps they were going to call me the next day or, and personally explain that, listen, we only are, we're only having very close family at the wedding. Or something along those lines, right? Who knows? 2 of us experienced the same life circumstance. Both of us were able to choose the meaning, choose the story. We wrote the narrative. One of us is suffering. One of us isn't.
