Re-Authoring Your Story and Finding Meaning After Setbacks
Do we suffer the appraisal of the event more than the event?
When we recount to ourselves and others an event, how we feel about it largely depends on how we are feeling at the time of the telling.
Life happens. As we experience life, our beliefs about ourselves and our past are challenged.
If I value connection but lose a relationship or a community, I may derive beliefs about myself from the loss. I lose control and hope; what’s gone is gone for good.
If I value security, I appraise my accomplishments by what they provide.
If the bills are paid and there’s food in the fridge, all is well. But when faced with insecurity, what then? We get stuck, and we lose the thread that traces our identity through circumstance and loss — common experiences that contribute to depression, anxiety, and trauma recovery.
Stifled and strangulated, we get caught in problem stories. If we fail, we will always fail. If our pursuits are thwarted and our attempts denied, it was our own fault. If a relationship turns sour, all relationships are contaminated.
““...the spirit of madness reigned. Orpheus’ singing could well have weakened their shots, but cacophony won.””
With distance, if we’re curious, this response to setbacks can tell us something. We have an experience, which reminds us of past setbacks, which recalls the script, cultural or personal, that we learned to respond with.
Not knowing what else to do, we perform it. We live on, but our story seems to get painted over. Like Orpheus’ song, what once brought comfort gets drowned out, and pain has a way of severing us from who we used to be. The past, or the derived meaning that carried us forward, can feel unreachable or irrelevant—an echo often felt in grief and depression. What happened? What did it mean? What remains?
We don’t rewrite our story; we re-author it.
Tell it again, pulling what we held and valued about ourselves through the pain to see what else is true, still. Without compromising or cheapening our experiences, what remains? Even now, in pain, suffering, setbacks, and mental health challenges, what still matters?
We notice only that which we pay attention to. Can we honour what remains? This isn’t about optimism; it’s about finding something we can hold on to today. Our values anchor our identity with lived experience. They are not goals but life directions, chosen, discovered, rediscovered, or created. Values-based therapy teaches that values are tied to meaning, and worth is not tied to conditions.
In therapy, if we look at, determine, and negotiate what it is we can control, our focus turns toward the question of responsibility. When depressed we arguably have an inflated sense of responsibility. Across life domains, the climate we inhabit, the relationships we cherish, our work, and our homes, any distress is internalized as a problem to solve, a call to heed. Others and their feelings, the well-being of the kids, threads of choices, the unforeseen consequences, and the emotional costs—we take it on.
And at some point, we withdraw from the weight of it, saying to ourselves, "I am responsible for everything going wrong, and I am powerless to actually change anything." Both responsible and helpless, every action confirms the self-criticism while reinforcing the sense of stuckness.
Failure is traced back to them. The hopelessness compounds, and we might stop trying altogether.
One way out of the trap is to loosen the logic. One can be both responsible and limited. Responsibility isn’t “for everything” but for responding to what is truly within your scope. Instead of the felt need to control outcomes, choosing instead to focus on how one relates to outcomes. To affirm, your actions can and do make a difference.
This is the heart of therapeutic work in depression and anxiety treatment, finding meaning, reclaiming values, and re-authoring a life story that supports healing.
FIELD NOTES FROM GREENFIELD COUNSELLINGThis is where you’ll find reflections on the kinds of struggles that bring people to therapy — anxiety, burnout, grief, transitions, and the quiet disconnection that makes life feel less like your own.
