“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” shrieked the little one.
Her tiny body was so full of indignation that I think even the hair in her ponytail shook.
At a recent family gathering, I was watching a full-on battle scene unfold over a chair.
Yes…a chair.

She had been happily sitting in a chair that was perfectly sized for preschoolers.

She abandoned it to play with something else, and her cousin decided he would sit in the chair.

And so it began.

Her screams communicated that there was something very valuable about sitting in that chair, which I am sure intensified his desire to sit there. He may have not known why it was valuable, but the fact that it was so valuable to her communicated to him that there was something important about getting to sit in that chair.

Their parents stepped in to take advantage of a learning moment and started a system of taking turns sitting in the chair.

This worked for a while, until she was busy doing something else when it was her turn to sit in the chair. Her cousin took the opportunity to sit in the chair some more, and, well, that did not go over well. He tried to look nonchalant, like “What’s her problem?” but his face couldn’t hide his triumph at getting extra time in the coveted chair.

When he begrudgingly vacated the seat of honor, she claimed it immediately and watched him with a suspicious side-eye, simultaneously looking longingly at the toys she had been playing with so happily before her turn came up.

She didn’t really want to sit in the chair, she just didn’t want him to get to sit in it.

When it was his turn again, he took the chair with him into the kitchen. He wanted to get some snacks and there was no way he was leaving the chair of honor unoccupied.

Eventually one of the adults brought in something else to sit on, so both kids could sit at the same time, and the whole thing was over. The allure of sitting vanished within a few seconds and the once precious chair was abandoned in favor of something else to fight over.

It was never about the chair.

We can chuckle at the obvious motives of these little cuties, but we do the same thing.

So often in the counseling room I find myself asking,

“What meaning have you attached to that?”

I can hear a story of something that happened to you and think about what might feel hard to me about that situation, but I am not you.

I can’t begin to figure out which direction to go in helping you work through something if I do not know what meaning is unfolding in your head around the situation you are describing.

It is so easy for us to blend our thoughts and feelings and past experiences into whatever moment we find ourselves reacting to.

It happens so automatically that we tend to immediately cling to the meaning we come up with as if it were absolutely true.

This is because our brains are truly amazing.

web of connections — Something happens, and in an instant our brains pull up everything we have connected to that thing.

What we know about the people involved, what we know about the context, past experiences.

I imagine that all the information our brains have that might be relevant to the situation are on display on multiple large screens, like in the situation room of the White House.

In the situation room, trained professionals bring their expertise to the situation and they deliberate in thoughtful discussion before taking action (I hope this is how it works! That’s how it seems to work in the movies, anyway.). But our brains, on the other hand, tend to jump to conclusions and we find ourselves reacting before we have thought it through.

It may be easiest to explain this with a scenario.

Let’s say I am confronted with a barking dog.

My brain may startle at the sound… or not, depending on whether I was expecting a dog to bark.

When I hear my daughter’s car pull up as she comes home from work, I know my dog will start barking and carrying on like she is an intruder. This doesn’t startle me, because I expect it. And I see his tail wagging, because he also knows it’s her and not, in fact, a bad guy.

But when I am home alone at night, and he starts barking, seemingly out of nowhere, I definitely startle! It may even take me a while to calm down and dismiss the scenes from horror movies my brain proceeds to show me in my imagination. Especially when I see the hair standing up on my dog’s back.

Now think about your experiences with dogs.

Sweet dog on a dog pillow — If my dog barks, I am not afraid of him because I know he is loyal to me.

“Dog” (to me, when it’s MY dog) means “Good Boy!” (the BEST boy, most of the time!)

If another dog were to bark at me, I maybe wouldn’t be so sure. I remember a time when my roommate’s parents’ cocker spaniel held me hostage on the couch until they came home because she barked at me if I moved! I didn’t know this dog, and I wasn’t sure how to navigate this situation. My own past experiences (or lack thereof) came into play here, because at that point in my life, the only experience I really had to draw from was my childhood dog, who was dumb as a stump and never barked at me. I wasn’t so much scared of the dog, but I didn’t want to get bit, either.

“Dog” might mean “uncertainty.”

If I were someone who had been attacked by a dog, I would have quite a different reaction. I would be terrified. In fact, the way PTSD works, it might not even be the dog bark that sets the reaction in motion. Anything my brain attached to that trauma could bring me back to the attack and trigger panic. It could be the sight of a similar-looking dog, the smell of fresh-cut grass (like I smelled at the time of the attack), or other sensory information like taste or touch.

“Dog could mean “danger.”

The way we attach meaning to things determines how we react.

We think these meanings are true, because our feelings get all activated.

When we slow ourselves down and separate out what is true, verses what we are thinking and feeling about what just happened, we can understand our reactions.

When we consider our past life experiences and hurts, we can gain insight into what we might be making the situation mean.

I like to use a journaling technique called FACETS to pause and look at all the facets of the situation and better understand the meaning I am attaching. You can read more about this technique here and here.

Sometimes this practice helps us see that we are reacting inappropriately.
Sometimes we take things personally that really were not meant that way.
Sometimes we feel powerless, so we find maladaptive ways to try to control something. Anything.
Sometimes we take responsibility for something that is not ours to carry.
Sometimes we are unnecessarily afraid or offended.
Sometimes our anger is really fear. Or grief.
Sometimes our loneliness is not about present time, but about past rejections.
And yes, sometimes, we are spot-on in our immediate reactions, too.

The next time you find yourself having a big emotion or rehashing a conversation in the privacy of your imagination, you might want to take a few minutes and journal through the FACETS of the situation on your mind.

What are you making it mean?

It’s usually not about the chair.

Jennie Sheffe, LPC, sitting on her couch at the office of Sparrow's Nest Counseling — If you find that you are a woman in PA who needs some help figuring out what it is about, please reach out through my website or give me a call at 717-219-4339. Just make sure you don’t text me, as texting is not encrypted or secure.

Jennie Sheffe is a Licensed Professional Counselor and National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her Carlisle, PA office. She offers Christian counseling to those who want to integrate faith into their therapy.

What Do You Mean?