For almost two years after Morty died, I carried a hurt I couldn’t put down.
A close friend had been absent through the hardest stretch of my life, from his illness through the weeks after his death.
We hadn’t had a fight. There had been no falling out. But every time I saw her, the feeling was right there. The hurt hadn’t moved.
Why?
Because the event was over. The meaning I had given it wasn’t.
Why time doesn’t really heal all wounds
We tend to believe that time heals things. Give a hurt enough space, and it softens on its own. That’s true for some things. But not for this.
When my friend wasn’t there the way I needed her to be, my mind gave it a meaning immediately. Something like: She doesn’t care about me the way I thought she did.
The event was her absence. The meaning was what my mind decided that absence said about her, about whether the friendship was what I’d believed it to be.
Time passes. The meaning doesn’t move.
This is what Morty discovered when he built the Lefkoe Occurring Process.
Events don’t carry meaning. We assign it. The meaning we assign is the source of the emotion, not the event itself.
Why this keeps the loop going
When something brings it back, you’re not returning to a neutral memory. You’re returning to the event plus the meaning, every time.
Venting to someone can feel like relief. But the meaning you gave the event stays exactly where it was. You’re describing it and reinforcing it in the same breath.
Time passing can soften things at the surface. The meaning underneath stays exactly where you left it.
The meaning is what generates the feeling. Addressing the meaning is what stops it.
What I finally did, and what you can do
In 2018, I was at a conference and read a book called The Four Sacred Gifts by Anita Sanchez. One of the gifts she writes about: forgive the unforgivable.
I thought about my friend.
At the conference I went to her, told her how I had felt, and we talked. She apologized. Her heart opened. Mine did too. We found our way back to each other.
But here is what I’ve thought about since.
I didn’t have to carry that for two years.
What had kept me in that loop was the meaning I had given her absence. I had never once examined it.
The Occurring Process is designed to do exactly this. It helps you separate the event from the meaning your mind constructed from it.
Here’s what it might have looked like if I had done that work at the time
What actually happened? My friend didn’t call as often during those months. She wasn’t at the memorial. She sent a card.
Those were the events.
She doesn’t care about me the way I thought she did. That was what my mind had constructed from them.
The process asks: what else could it mean?
Maybe she didn’t know how to be present for grief and was afraid of making it worse. She could have been carrying her own struggles that year that I didn’t know about. Or she cared deeply and had no idea how much her absence had affected me.
I couldn’t know which of those was true. But I could have seen that the meaning I was carrying wasn’t a fact. It was one interpretation among several, and I was treating it as the only one.
That’s what the Occurring Process offers. It doesn’t tell you which interpretation is correct. It shows you that you’ve been living inside one story as if it were reality, and gives you a way to step back from it.
A note before you go
It took two years and reading a book to get me to that conversation with my friend. Once I had it, the reconnection happened in minutes.
The hurt was real. The meaning I gave it wasn’t the only meaning available. And when I could finally see that, the friendship could breathe again.
That’s what meaning costs when we don’t notice it. And that’s what becomes possible when we do.
The Occurring Course teaches you to make this a habit. Not just for one old hurt, but for the fear that flares before a hard conversation, the anger that won’t settle, and the hurt that catches you when you least expect it.
When you learn to dissolve meaning consistently, these stop having the same hold on you. Things that used to knock you sideways simply don’t anymore.
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