Key takeaways
How a difficult experience affects us depends largely on the meaning we make of it, not just on what happened.
Painful conclusions like “I am not good enough” are usually logical given what someone lived through, not irrational thoughts.
Meanings are also shaped by culture and by whose voice is believed. Gently revisiting them is central to most good therapy.
Two soldiers can survive the same battle and walk away with entirely different lives afterward. One is haunted by it for decades; the other, while never untouched, finds a way to carry it. The difference is rarely the event itself — it’s the meaning each person made of it: what it said about them, about the world, about who they could still become.
This is the third question in the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF): “What sense did you make of it? What is the meaning of these experiences to you?”
We are meaning-making creatures
Human beings don’t just experience events — we interpret them, almost instantly and often unconsciously. A child who is repeatedly criticised doesn’t just feel bad in the moment; they may quietly conclude I am not good enough, and carry that belief into every classroom, relationship, and job interview that follows. A person who survives an assault may come away with the meaning the world is dangerous and I am powerless in it — a meaning that can shape their nervous system’s threat-response for years.
Some of the most common meanings people arrive at after difficult experiences are painfully familiar to anyone who has sat with real distress: feeling unsafe, abandoned, defeated, worthless, ashamed, contaminated, or that life is simply unjust. These aren’t irrational thoughts to be argued away. They are usually entirely logical conclusions, given what a person has actually lived through.
Why this matters more than the “facts”
Here’s the useful, slightly counter-intuitive insight the PTMF offers: it’s rarely the bare facts of what happened that determine how someone is affected — it’s the meaning layered on top. Consider two people who both lose a job. One makes meaning of it as proof I’m a failure who ruins everything; the other makes meaning of it as a hard break, but not the end of the story. Same event, wildly different emotional aftermath.
This is also, in a sense, what most good therapy already does — cognitive behavioural therapy, psychodynamic work, narrative therapy, and others all spend much of their time gently helping people examine and, where it serves them, revise the meanings they’ve made. The PTMF’s addition is to insist that meaning isn’t purely a private, individual thing happening inside someone’s head. Meanings are also shaped by culture, by what our society tells us a “good life” or a “strong person” looks like, and by whose voice gets believed in the first place. A woman who is not believed when she reports abuse, or a person whose distress is dismissed because of their background, is having a meaning imposed on them from the outside — and that, too, becomes part of the story they carry.
From symptom to story
One of the most freeing shifts the PTMF describes is moving from the meaning “I have a symptom of an illness” to “I developed a survival strategy that made sense at the time.” The facts of a difficult life don’t change. What changes is the relationship a person has with those facts — and that relationship is often exactly where healing lives.
This is delicate work, and it isn’t instant. Old meanings, especially ones formed in childhood or under repeated pressure, can feel like simple truths rather than interpretations at all. Gently testing and, where helpful, rewriting them — ideally with support, whether from a therapist, a trusted person, or in the safety of your own reflection — is one of the most powerful tools available for genuine change.
Next in this series: “What Did You Have to Do to Survive? Understanding Threat Responses.”
This post draws on Mary Boyle and Lucy Johnstone’s A Straight Talking Introduction to the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PCCS Books, 2020). If you’re currently taking psychiatric medication, please don’t stop or change it without talking to your own doctor first.
