You can list the hard things that happened. You have told each of them many times, to friends and to yourself at night. What you have not done is put them next to each other and ask what you made each one mean.
It is this library's own term. It is not a therapy and it is not a clinical method.
01
The sentence it runs on
One sentence holds the idea. Subtract the story and get curious about the meaning you have added.
02
Two parts
The first part is seeing. In any moment that stayed with you there is what happened, and there is what you took it to mean. The two can feel like one thing. The Meaning You Added is about telling them apart.
The second part is making. That is creating meaning behind the moments you have put together. From a place where you are not free, you can start creating a meaning of how to get to freedom.
03
Why a map
One moment tells you little.
Put several side by side, from work, from home and from years apart, and the same meaning may show up in moments that have nothing else in common. Put together that way, they make a map of meaning.
Subtraction, this library's method, also works from scenes in different parts of a life and never from one.
04
One example
You were left off an email about a project.
What happened is that an email went to six people and not to you.
What you took it to mean might be that they don't think much of your work, or that you did something, or that you are on your way out. Each of those is a different meaning, and each could send you off to do something different that afternoon. The email is the same in all three.
Sometimes the meaning is simply accurate. People do get left off on purpose. Getting curious does not mean deciding you were wrong. It means noticing that the meaning was added.
05
Where it lives
It is not a product, and it is not a step you book. It runs through this whole library. Every page that asks what a moment was taken to mean is doing a small piece of it.
06
Where the idea comes from
The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote about finding meaning, including in suffering that can't be avoided, and he developed a school of therapy called logotherapy. What Logotherapy Is points to where to read about that.
Meaning Mapping borrows the question. It is not logotherapy.
07
What it is not
It is not being told what your life means. Nobody hands you the map.
It is not a way of making a loss smaller, and it is not for the first days of one. When Meaning Is the Wrong Thing to Offer says when to leave it alone.
If you are in crisis, licensed mental-health care is the right door.If tonight is an emergency, call or text 988 (US). This library is not that door.
How a meaning relates to a rule is on Meaning and the Nine Rules.