Morty kept a written account of the year Brittany could barely stand to be in a room with him, and there’s one line in it I still think about.
He wrote about how close they’d been before that, and then how everything changed once she hit her teens.
“When she reached 13-14 years old, she changed. I joke that she was captured by aliens who left one of their own in her place, because my daughter couldn’t possibly have acted the way my daughter acted between the ages of 13 and 18-19.”
By the time she was a freshman, Brittany was getting angry with him often, telling him he was annoying, worse than annoying, and asking him to leave her room. Morty usually responded the way most parents would.
“I usually responded with something like: ‘Why are you angry with me? What did I do?’ Those questions usually led to Brittany getting even more annoyed and her yelling at me to get out of her room. My response to her yelling usually led to an argument that left both of us upset.”
What was driving the fights
Morty eventually asked himself a harder question: what was making him respond that way in the first place? He found his answer, and wrote it down plainly.
“What prompted me to say things to her that led to the arguments? The meaning I was giving her behavior: She was ruining our relationship (which was very important to me); she was angry with me; I couldn’t talk to her any more; etc. I didn’t like those meanings, so I tried to say something that would change the situation. My attempts to defend myself or change Brittany inevitably led to an argument.”
Those meanings hurt, so he kept trying to defend himself against them. And every time he defended himself, an argument followed.
He started asking what else it could mean
At some point, Morty stopped assuming his first interpretation was the only one available to him.
“At some point I started to ask myself, what else could her behavior mean? Several possible answers included: She was individuating, as she should be doing. She had a problem that day with one of her teachers. Her hormones were raging. She had some difficulties with friends during the day.”
He realized something else too. He had never actually seen their relationship get ruined. He had never seen proof that he’d lose the ability to talk to her. All he had seen was her behavior, and that behavior could support any number of interpretations, not just the one that had been hurting him.
The day he tried something different
Here’s how Morty described it, in his own words.
“So one day, as a result of doing the type of thinking I just described, I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t respond to her accusations. I didn’t get upset. I merely got up and left the room without saying a word. And after I left the room and closed her door, I said: ‘Honey, I hear a daughter who loves her dad very much and who’s probably having a hard day. Sorry about that. I love you too sweetheart.'”
“As I walked away I heard a shoe bounce off the door. Ten minutes later she came out of her room, threw her arms around me, kissed me, and apologized for being shitty.”
Why?
Nothing about Morty’s love for Brittany had changed between that day and every day before it. What changed was the meaning he gave those events.
He hadn’t found a clever thing to say that fixed her mood. He’d found the distinction between what Brittany did and what he decided it meant, and once he saw it clearly, there was nothing left in him that needed defending.
Our occurrings
We like to think events come with their meanings attached, that a slammed door or an angry word means what it feels like it means, the way a red light means stop.
It doesn’t work that way.
The mind is a meaning-making machine. Something happens, and in a fraction of a second, before we’re aware it’s happening, we’ve assigned that event a meaning. We call that meaning an occurring, because it’s what’s occurring for us, not what actually happened. In other words, the meaning isn’t in the event. It’s in our minds.
Brittany yelling and asking him to leave her room was the event.
“I hear a daughter who loves her dad very much and who’s probably having a hard day” was the meaning Morty made instead of the one that had been hurting him for years.
How you dissolve the meaning
You don’t need more patience than the rest of us to learn this. Morty developed a process for dissolving a meaning like that, and it comes down to six steps.
- Notice and label the feeling that came up. For Morty, that was hurt, followed by the urge to defend himself.
- Notice the event itself, stripped down to only what could be filmed by a camera. Not “she’s ruining our relationship.” Just: she raised her voice and asked him to leave.
- Notice the meaning your mind attached to that event. This is usually so fast and so automatic that most people never catch it happening. It just feels true.
- Notice the distinction between the event and the meaning. You can’t point a camera at “she doesn’t love me anymore.” You can only point it at a door closing.
- Come up with a few alternative interpretations, ones that are just as believable as the one that hurt you.
- Notice what happens to the feeling once you’ve dissolved the meaning. Often it softens, and sometimes it disappears completely.
I think about my client Jan, who ran into a version of this at her own family’s Christmas table. Her mother tasted a mac and cheese recipe Jan was proud of, said it was too rich, and threw the rest away. Jan felt her heart drop, the way any of us would. But she’d learned this process, so she ran it.
- Feeling: Her heart dropped.
- Event: Her mother said the dish was too rich and threw it away.
- Occurring: I suck.
- Alternative: Her mother is the kind of person who focuses on what’s wrong, and rich for her mother didn’t mean rich for everyone else at that table.
- Change: The feeling that would normally hang over her entire day lifted within minutes.
That’s what Morty discovered outside Brittany’s door, the distinction between what happened and what it means. You can find that distinction for yourself too, whenever you’re ready to look for it.
What this made possible
This is what I keep coming back to. Morty didn’t get one perfect night that fixed everything. Brittany kept getting annoyed with him, kept yelling, kept kicking him out of her room, for another four or five years. The difference is that he stopped reacting to any of it. Morty put it this way himself:
“She got annoyed at me and yelled at me and kicked me out of her room many times over the next 4-5 years, but for the most part I no longer reacted to what she said and did. I was clear that it had no meaning. As a result of my not reacting, the arguments stopped. And because we stopped arguing, we formed an even closer bond between us. She knew I loved her unconditionally and would always be there for her because I didn’t argue with her (which is usually interpreted as withdrawing your love) when she got annoyed with me or yelled at me.”
Brittany felt loved because her outbursts never got turned into evidence against her. Whatever she said or did, Morty never let it become proof of something wrong with her, or with them.
I still think about the relationships in my own life that would have gone differently if I’d learned to make that distinction sooner, starting with my own father.
I’d love for you to gain the habit of making that distinction too, whether that’s a comment from your mother, a tone in your spouse’s voice, or something your own kid said this week that landed like a slap.
I hope you find a reason to try this soon, whether it’s a slammed door in your own house or something smaller. And if you do, I’d love to hear what you found on the other side.
How to dissolve negative feelings in seconds (and make it a compelling habit)
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