Emotional scars

Personal experiences drive our lives. 90% of how you perceive the world comes from personal experiences, and only 10% from what you learn. People don’t consider risk in an analytical way; they consider it in a cultural way.

A lot of things that you may consider risky or ‘scary’ to pursue are heavily influenced by the culture you live in, your past, your family, the mindset of the people that surround you, and, most importantly, the bad experiences you have had in your life. That is why we all differ so much when it comes to risk calculation and the way we perceive certain things.

We may be able to overcome bad experiences fairly quickly, but the truth is that they all teach us a lesson. After overcoming a bad experience, what’s left behind are the emotional scars, which, one way or another, will have a significant impact on your next decision in life. That’s just how human psychology works, and it’s hard to avoid. There is absolutely no chance that someone who lived through the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000 or the market crash of 2008 thinks the same about investing as someone who has not experienced a market crash yet. Even though these market crashes happened years ago, the psychological scars are still present.

If you were born after 2001, there is no way you think of terrorism the same way as someone who experienced 9/11 firsthand. Twenty-two years later, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are the most common health effects of the 9/11 attacks. Up to 20% of adults directly exposed to the disaster or injured in the attack had PTSD symptoms five to six years after the event; this is four times the rate in the general population. Time has passed, wounds have healed, but the emotional scars remain present.

Even though we try our best to avoid bad experiences that leave behind emotional scars, we should admit that we learn a lot from them.

Tony Robins once said

The meaning and the purpose behind some events are unknowable. This is the ultimate test of our faith. We must trust that everyone in life is here to learn different lessons at different times, that good and bad experiences are only the perceptions of man. After all, some of your worst experiences have truly been your best. They’ve sculpted you, trained you, developed within you a sensitivity and set you in a direction that reaches out to impact your ultimate destiny.

Next time you meet someone who thinks differently than you or disagrees with you, try to understand that there is a possibility that you are both right, but you are simply two people with different sets of experiences talking over each other.

Thanks for reading!