Sometimes things happen that are beyond your control. An event. A person on the street. A passing comment. All beyond your control. The impact they have on your life, beyond your control. The way you deal with such an eventt can, in mere seconds, have an impact on the rest of your life. Thing about it. A random person on the street can make a passing comment to you moments before they are ran over by a bus. The odds of this happening, well trying rising from the dead. However, just consider it. That person alone changes things. If you notice them or not, maybe they look like your crazy Aunt Verna. Impact. Anyway, then there is the comment. Did you hear it? Did you process it? Did it make a connection to something else in your brain? Impact. Then the bus comes along. Did you actually see the accident? Did you hear it? Did the reactions of those around you bring it all into focus? Impact.

These impacts, small or large, play a role in the direction of your life. Lets go back to the person on the street. They remind you of your crazy Aunt Verna. That may bring up a memory of dear sweet Verna. Ok, now think about your impressions of Verna. Did you love her? Hate her? She made the best Strawberry-Apple Pie ever created? For the sake of the inane, take the last one. Verna brings to mind pie. Pie takes you to the summer. Summer takes you to the family trip to the beach. You see the idea.

Ok, back to the Verna look-alike. What did they say? A comment about the weather? Maybe they were checking traffic? Was the comment to you? Someone else on the street? Themselves? Go with this, the Aunt Verna person comments about the weather. Pretend it’s cloudy for the sake of argument. What do clouds bring to mind? Gray days lounging around? Maybe the threat of rain? Even puffy white clouds that laze in the sky? Lets say that cloudy days bring to mind lounging around the house. What do you do when you lounge around? Watch TV? Read a book? Surf the web? Sleep? Talk on the phone? So the weather brings to mind rainy days lounging around the house reading.

So where are we. The bus. Do you watch as the person is hit? Do you simply hear the squeal of tires against pavement? Oblivious, do you respond to the gasps and cries of those around you? Caught in the reverie of lounging with a book and slice of pie on rainy summer days you brain connects and you are convinced that Verna was just ran over by a bus. Quite a difference from reality isn’t it? But each connection that the brain makes creates a new connection and a different outcome for your mind. Stray too far from the original and your mind creates it’s own outcomes. And that is where therapy comes in.

Everything that occurs impacts your life. How your brain connects all the details determines what you remember and what actually happened. In the above there was a personal connection for each event. For some people there is no connections to draw and what happened happened with no lasting impact. Maybe you thought of books and pie with no Verna. Very little damage. But the one who has connections to connections to connections has a very different remembrance of the events. It becomes more personal. The more personal an event the more likely to have a lasting impact.