I have always thought that the wonderful thing about experience is that it can never be false. What I decide the experience means can be false, what actions I take based on the experience can be helpful or harmful, but experience itself simply happens. For example, it is not the experience of rage or fear that is the problem, it is what is done or not done, what meaning is attached to the experience that causes the problems. Usually, of course, ascribing meaning to experience happens before we actually think. We hear a voice in our head and assume that it is, for example, either schizophrenia or some sort of other-worldly message. Most often we simply accept the story that traditionally goes with a specific set of events. We go further. We equate the story to the event, assessing and locking reality into place in a way that affects our capacity to perceive.

Storying for humans is a feed-back loop between the outer and inner worlds of lived experience. We hear a voice in our head, and it is not just an experience that could have several different stories attached, we become, in our own mind, the story that is being told, and then we judge ourselves by its rules. We forget that it is just a story. We forget that story works more like a verb than a noun. We get caught up in the nounness of the world; we have an experience of voices, we attach to the experience what we have been told it means, we judge ourselves by the story, and in that moment we have gone from a being experiencing to either a schizophrenic or a divine messenger.