A couple of years ago, one of my friends went to a neighborhood block party. She was connecting with an older man, a neighbor. They started chatting in the usual way, introducing themselves and talking about their families. For the most part, the conversation wasn’t memorable, however, after she told the neighbor about her husband’s work, the neighbor said, “Oh, so I guess our taxes bought your new car.”

This comment might be seen as a joke, a friendly rib. However, the woman didn’t take it lightly. It hurt her feelings. It made her sad. It made her mad.

Yes, they had just purchased a nice car. Reliable, and maybe a little on the fancy side.

The woman’s husband was an active military member. Over the fifteen years he had been in the armed forces, he had been deployed several times for long stints, up to a year at a time. Their young child was recently diagnosed with a serious disease and had been spending weeks in the hospital for treatments. And, on top of that, her husband was notified that he was going to have to spend a year abroad, away from the family. Her husband purchased the car for its reliability, its ease of service, its ability to meet their family’s needs, and, the make and model was popular in their area, creating opportunities for resale if the family needed to move again or their needs changed. Also, he liked it. That should have been enough, right?

It was a senseless comment that had a deep impact, far deeper than the person saying it realized.

So, what would you do? How do you typically respond to situations like this one?

In this situation, my friend paused and changed the subject. She had too much on her plate and didn’t have the energy to spare. She didn’t need to engage in challenging conversation with a neighbor that she could keep at an arm’s distance, politely wave to, never needing to go beyond the niceties of passing conversation.

But, the comment stayed in her thoughts. She couldn’t shake it. The moment was fleeting but the idea stuck with her for days, months, and she could still recall it years later. In that moment, she didn’t feel safe in her community. She felt that her neighbors were watching her family from their front porches, judging her every financial decision.

My friend had many words to describe this neighbor. She had many words to describe his comment. I’m sure you can come up with them, too. But she couldn’t move through the interaction. She couldn’t make sense of it. She couldn’t change her feelings around it.

We’ve all been in situations like these.

Ones that we can’t cut lose from our memories. And the reason why we can’t unstick them is that we haven’t fully processed them yet. We haven’t learned from them. We can’t figure out what they are telling us, or I should clarify, we haven’t yet figured out the productive value of what they are telling us.

The Resilience Thinking Method™ is a way of processing information we don’t understand and agree with. It allows us to make sense of things that don’t make sense. It’s a way of learning about the world that gives us tools for future moments and tools for processing what we learned so that we can move forward.

Now its your turn. What’s been bothering you? Lets make sense of it together.