Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and in this week's vlog, I'm going to share with you something I've gotten really good at in life that I believe will transform your entire existence and your relationship with everything that happens in the future in your life if you commit to getting good at it too and I'm going to teach you how in this vlog and that thing is a skill, it's an orientation, it's a mindset, it's a practice, and it is meaning making. Let me explain. If you know me well or even not that well, if you've been around here paying attention for any length of time, you likely know what the defining moment of my life was. I am one of these people who has one day in their life that changed everything.
It was August 9th, 1994, and that morning I came to, I wasn't sleeping, but I just sort of awakened out of a fog of denial on the floor of a crack house with a blonde wig on my head. I was a prostitute. I was a high school dropout. I was a crack addict. I had been a crystal meth addict, really bad. I was not living anywhere in particular at that moment in time. I did not have a key to a place that I lived in, and that was my resume. That night by a fluke, an utter serendipitous miracle, I got taken on a first date with a guy, some rando guy that I'd met at a gas station at three in the morning, a few nights prior, I got taken on a first date to a 12-step meeting for drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and I haven't had a drink or a drug since that day. It is the defining moment of my life and finding myself at age 20 with a resume that read high school dropout. By the way, I went to three different high schools and then managed to drop out. High school dropout, crack addict, prostitute. Having that resume at the age of 19 and 20 years old and then having to build a life from there and being now really stoked about the life I've built from there has taught me something really powerful. There is no state of mess-uppy wreckage, devastation in my life that I can't recover from, and there is nothing that can happen to me that I can't turn into positive meaning I know that about myself deeply.
I got turned on to the call girl agency that I worked for, which was my sort of means of being a prostitute, by a friend of mine, someone I'm still in touch with. Actually to this day. She never tells a soul that she's been a prostitute. I don't even think-- she has an ex-husband, and I'm not actually even sure if she's remarried now or she's living with somebody--I'm not even sure he knows. Literally, she doesn't tell anybody. I'm certainly not going to tell anybody, but for her, that's like shame and horror personified. She would never tell anybody that I went a different route with it. I brought it forward into the light. I didn't do it quickly or easily. I did it because as I built the Bright Line Eating® movement, I didn't want someone to find out and then tell everybody and turn it into something that I didn't want it to be or to get to frame the narrative in a certain way. I decided, "Hey, if it's ever going to come out, I'd rather be the one to define the narrative about what it was, and I don't want anybody to go, do you know what I heard about Susan Peirce Thompson?" I didn't want that. I didn't want to live in fear of that. So, gradually over time, I started to just give voice to it, and now you can tell I give two wits. I don't mind at all. Some people have told me I wish you wouldn't talk about that so much. I'm like, well, okay. You can wish that I don't care that I talk about it a lot. I think it helps people because a lot of people have something shameful in their past or something they perceive to be shameful, something they feel shame about, and I think it could be liberating to hear someone talk about something, and that's part of the meaning that I make of it.
Here's some of the toolkit that I've built over the years for meaning making, and here's how you can be good at meaning making, and here's why you might want to be good at meaning making. Some of the meaning I've made out of that. My experience there is that addiction and recovery are the foundation principles of my life. I now teach people for a living who have an addictive relationship with food in particular, how to recover, and I teach people how to own their story and not feel so much shame and to tell the truth and to be authentic, and some of how I capitalize on that experience of mine enables and emboldens people in doing that.
I've turned that pivot point in my life into something positive and beneficial that I use to help the world, and this is one of the first principles I want to teach you about meaning making is if it's a big thing that's happened, the meaning is going to have to be big. If you've gone through a devastating divorce, followed by a 10-year depression, the meaning you're going to have to make out of that to make it satisfying to make it worthwhile, to make it sort of fit in the ethos of the meaning making thing is going to have to be a big meaning. Because it just took 10 years of your life and it was devastating, right? If it's a flat tire, you don't need to make such big meaning out of it, but some that was a thing that happened and how do you make meaning out of it? There's a good phrase that I like to use, especially in the moment, which is, "How could this be happening? Not to me, but for me."
Meaning making involves an entire factory of processes that are very, very deep because you can't make meaning out of something and have it be a BS story that you don't believe where you're trying to spin a good angle on something. This is not like slapping a smiley face sticker on the front of something and going there. It's all okay. Now, deep down, you're bullshitting yourself. It doesn't work. The process of meaning making is actually turning that thing to good account, actually using it as a springboard for growth, a way to serve others, a turning point in your life, an eye-opener to a new perspective, a reminder to slow down and easy does it, and I'm thinking about the flat tire now to appreciate the good in your life, a reminder about the good of humanity if someone stopped to help you with that flat tire and a moment to actually appreciate how there really are so many kind good people in this world, whatever it is. You've got to actually make good meaning out of it, and then spin the story of triumph instead of victim hood.
I know some people, I have close people in my life who are wizards at spinning the victim story. No matter what happens, I see them spin a story out of it, of things never work out for me. I always get rejected. I get injured all the time. I'm the unluckiest person I know, etc., etc., etc. I have people in my life who do this almost for a living. It seems they spin a miserable narrative out of the things that happen in their life, and it's very painful for me to watch because I'm thinking, "Oh, there's a much more empowering story you could be painting about that." I'm seeing actually them do better than the stories they're telling themselves, and yet they won't spin the triumphant story out of it. They clinging to the victim story.
I think there's neutral stories. I think there's victim stories, and I think there's triumph stories. There's stories of resilience and overcoming, and what stories are you spinning about your life. It's not just about spinning stories, it's also about doing the work. You've got to feel the grief. You've got to process the trauma. You've got to really seek the lesson, like sift through that sand, find the pearls. You've got to really do that work. It's deep work. I have gotten to the place that I've gotten to out of really a lot of groups. It was six years, from age 14 to age 20, defining years that I was mostly having, wanting sex, doing a ton of drugs and wasting my potential basically, and I got pretty deep into the underworld and my personality got pretty warped. It was not a small thing. I had a best friend when I was 14. By the age of 15, she'd abandoned our friendship. I scared her too much. I was going deep in the underworld and she didn't want to know about it and go with me. She couldn't. She was too healthy, and so we stopped being in touch for years. We're back in touch now. It was a big deal. My addiction, it was not a trivial thing, and the way that I've been able to spin meaning out of it involved a process of sitting in 12-step meetings for years, actually decades, telling the story of it and draining the shame out of it and normalizing it to the best of my ability. I mean, in 12-step rooms. Lots of people have stories like that. Mine's up there in its gruesomeness, but it's certainly not unique. I mean, the details are unique, but the intensity of it is not unique. It's not standard, but it's definitely not unique, and so that's a safe place for me to tell that story over and over again.
Now, research shows that if you tell a story of the worst thing that's ever happened to you several times into a tape recorder, to a close friend, or write it out on paper, note that those are different options for introverts versus extroverts. Pick your process. Whatever works for you, tell it into a tape recorder. Tell it to a good friend or write it out. If you spend 15 minutes a day, even just over four sessions, doing that for the worst thing that's ever happened to you in life, you will be happier for months after that. Your immune system will be boosted for months out of that, and you will be well on your way to making good meaning out of it. Keep going with that process and find a way to spin it into a triumph story. The biggest options are a turning point in your life, a way that you're now able to relate and understand to others and help them. A service orientation, the birth of some sort of calling, the birth of some sort of new perspective, a way that you are now someone you never could have or would've been without that experience. The more you can craft it into something that has worked for you or others or created meaning or purpose in your life, the more you reach a point where you wouldn't even consider wanting to change the course of reality, even if you could and make it not have happened, or you come to the point where you're at peace with it having happened because you know that you have made such amazing meaning out of it.
Again, if it's a big thing, you're going to have to make a lot of meaning out of it to make that add up. I am not saying go into denial here. This is all real. You're actually like, I really truly would never, ever prefer a world in which I hadn't gone through that addiction. I've just made too much good out of it in my life. I prefer the world in which I am an addict in recovery, who helps other addicts to recover. I prefer that world. I love this world. I wouldn't even know who I would be without addiction and recovery, and I want my identity. I love my identity. I wouldn't trade it in for anything. It's part and parcel of who I am and how I understand the world and how I understand myself. I love calling myself an addict in recovery.
I was just having lunch with someone yesterday who was like, "Recovery? but Susan, I look at you, you've recovered. Maybe it's seize the day." I'm like, no, it's not. Seize the day you knucklehead. I am an addict living in recovery. To me, there's nothing pejorative about that at all. So my identity, it's who I am. There's so much badassery in that for me. Other people don't get it, and that's fine. Yes, I have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of addictive depravity. Yes, I have recovered. On the other hand, I am in recovery because I've got a brain that will sabotage me if I don't stay in recovery. So, I like the journey metaphor. I am in recovery. I could claim I have recovered, but I prefer thinking of myself as being in recovery. Okay, I digress.
Why is this important? Why would you want to practice your meaning making your stories that you spin and make sure that you're spinning triumph narratives about the things that happen in your life? Why? Because when you get good at it, here's what happens. Suddenly you have no fear about life anymore because you know deep down without a shadow of a doubt that no matter what happens, you will gobble it up and turn it into a blessing. A big load of lemons arrives at your front doorstep and you're just like, "Woo! I didn't know that for the next week, year, decade, I'm making lemonade. This is awesome. I can't wait to see what unfolds from this because I am so good at turning my negatives into positives and then some positives and then some and then some and then some." And when you know you're that good at it, the whole world, the whole process, the whole experience of being alive is nothing but good experiences and amazing growth opportunities that you're going to turn into incalculable blessings for you and others.
That's all there is. Good things, those are easy. Everybody enjoys being happy and having positive experiences. Yay! Struggles, challenges, difficulties, failures, depressions, hardships, deaths, setbacks, in which case you're going to be on this amazing journey of discovering the meaning, finding the lesson, and turning it into more blessing than you ever could have imagined, and that's going to be quite a rich journey, and you're going to look forward to it. It's like there's no failure. There's just opportunities to learn really, really helpful lessons and then pass them on to others. There's no setback. There's no tragedy. There's just opportunities to take really, really terrible things that happen and find the way to use them to help yourself and the world to provide succor, to provide comfort, to provide lessons, to be a mentor, to be uniquely qualified to help other people going through that same tragedy down the line, people who would have no one else to talk to otherwise.
This is one of my biggest superpowers. I invite you to consider making it a superpower. It's a very, very fun and satisfying way to live life, meaning making. I truly believe that one of our biggest jobs in this life is to craft stories and beliefs that serve us, that elevate us, that help others that have positive impact. Watch the stories you tell yourself about what's happening to you and the stories you turn them into over time, and if you note that you've made some really disempowering stories about the past, just note that you can rewrite them. The story writing process, the meaning making process. It never ends. I'm always involved in it, always. What does my marriage mean? What's my motherhood journey mean? What's my story about my career right now? What's my story about my life right now? I'm always writing and rewriting those stories and crafting them into better versions that serve me more and more and more. It's a fun thing. Life is a game, man. Make the rules in a way that makes it fun to play, meaning making. It's a craft, it's an art, it's a privilege. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
