One of the most useful distinctions I know is this one: the difference between what happened and what you made it mean.
Both feel real. Both feel like seeing clearly. But they are doing completely different things, and conflating them is one of the primary ways borrowed scripts maintain their grip.
A fact is observable. She didn’t return my message. He looked away when I spoke. They didn’t invite me to that meeting. These are events. Specific, bounded, without inherent meaning until meaning is assigned.
A story is what the mind does next. She doesn’t respect me. He isn’t interested in what I have to say. They’re edging me out. The story is not wrong, necessarily. Sometimes the interpretation is accurate. But it is always an interpretation, running through the lens of every previous experience that felt similar to this one.
The problem is that the nervous system does not always distinguish between the two. When a story is old enough and grooved deep enough, it stops feeling like an interpretation. It feels like seeing.
Neuroscience has a name for this: confirmation bias operating at the level of pattern recognition. We are wired, for very good evolutionary reasons, to find what we are looking for. The nervous system does not start from neutrality and work toward a conclusion. It runs its most familiar pattern and searches for the evidence to confirm it.
Which means that a script about not being wanted will find evidence of not being wanted, even in rooms where the evidence for the opposite is abundant.
This is not a character flaw. It is a survival mechanism that has outlived the original threat.
The practice is simple to describe and genuinely difficult to do: to catch yourself in the moment of story-making and ask, clearly and without judgment, is this what happened, or is this what I’ve decided it means?
That question does not resolve the situation. It does not tell you whether the interpretation is accurate. But it creates a brief, crucial pause between stimulus and response. And in that pause, something else becomes possible.
That space is where IMIE works. Not in the resolution. In the pause before the groove runs all the way to the end.
