How Meaning Making Impacts Us
“Your body lives inside the meaning it has learned.”
Every moment of your life has two layers:
Your nervous system responds not just to the events, but to the story wrapped around them. This module explores how meanings—personal, cultural, inherited—shape your physiology, your reactions, and your lived reality.
Meaning can:
Meaning is not fixed; it is:
Your body lives inside the meaning it has learned. Sometimes the event is long gone, but the meaning remains active, shaping your daily physiology.
Often what lingers after an overwhelming event is not the event itself but the story:
These meanings create:
This work isn’t about denying the past.
It’s about noticing: Is my body living in the old story or the reality of now? And how much of my “now reality” is being shaped and informed by the past—is it possible there is another more REAL reality available to me, less wrapped in story, fear and meaning making from the past?
If you were endlessly bullied when you were young, you might have subconsciously developed a meaning about yourself and the world around you (life & others), as well as developed a posture congruent with a freeze—an attempt to become invisible (not a threat or an interest to anyone).
Over time the meaning you might make from those experiences would be that you feel unwanted, disliked and threatened, even in situations where you’re totally safe & loved.
In this case learning the difference between the reality of what you lived through (being bullied) and the meanings you’ve drawn about yourself (there’s something wrong with me, I am unwanted, disliked) would be vital for you to become free from painful stories and meanings you made from those experiences.
Inside the Golden Path, we will call meanings → “overcouplings”.
In somatic work, the process of linking past meaning to present cues is called over coupling.
An over coupling happens when:
Over couplings can be:
This is somatic conditioning—your whole system responding like Pavlov’s dog.
Inside the Golden Path, we remain steadfast in our truth that our bodies’ responses are benevolent. Over couplings have kept you alive. And they are benevolent acts meant to help you learn, upload important information and use it well.
For example: Touch the hot stove → get burned/hurts → never touch it again. This is wisdom.
However, overcoupling becomes complex when we use it with people. A hot stove/fire behaves consistently. However, humans do not. Each human is very different, even if they have similar traits, behaviors and so on.
When overcoupling for survival—your nervous system tends to turn people into archetypes. For example:
The body doesn’t see the actual person. It sees/feels the familiar pattern and responds for safety.
These are the hardest to untangle because the body responds to: Someone now based on Someone then.
Relational over-couplings are the moments when your body confuses “today’s beloved or the present moment with yesterday’s wounding.”
This is when your system reaches into the past and lays it over the present, so someone who is safe, kind, or genuinely available gets met with armor, fear, or vigilance that can feel unfounded, disorienting, or even unfair.
This can be heartbreaking inside relationships of any kind.
When you meet your partner, friend, child, parent, or client as if they are the old figure your system learned to brace against, they may be met with reactions that don’t actually belong to them.
Your meaning making and somatic response may bring in:
Your meaning making and somatic response may bring in:
It’s disorienting for both people because the reaction isn’t actually about the relationship you have now—it’s about an old relationship that hasn’t yet been uncoupled.
When this happens, everyone and all possibilities are kept inside a cage of the past.
Some somatic clues to help you recognize when you’re over-coupling for survival…
Your body reacts intensely even though the environment is not actually threatening.
Small experiences trigger huge responses—rage, terror, collapse, closure, ejection, rejection/repulsion. This reaction belongs to an older story and has been reactivated in the now moment.
Within the Golden Path, we would place (all) phobias as over couplings. Your system reacts to a fear as if your life is at stake.
Let’s say someone becomes activated by even the idea of getting on an elevator, being in a crowded room, wearing tight clothing or getting into an MRI machine.
Somatic responses:
The body behaves as if oxygen is running out—even when it isn’t. In fact, for someone with this phobia, simply the idea of having to get onto an elevator is enough to cause the somatic response cascade. No actual threat is present, but the very idea of it is enough. This is a sure sign of overcoupling.
Many over couplings begin generations before you. They come from:
Researchers: Brian G. Dias and Kerry J. Ressler at Yerkes National Primate Research Center / Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Published: December 1, 2013 (Nature Neuroscience)
Mice were exposed to the scent of cherry blossoms and then received an electric shock. The experiment found this stress passed down to their descendants, actually anatomically changing the mice descendants’ olfactory systems. Meaning, descendants reacted with stress to the scent of cherry blossoms despite never being shocked.
It is an interesting inquiry to consider…where might your system be carrying inherited responses to war, migration, famine, tyranny, religion or other ancestral struggles.
For example, if you have a complicated relationship with food that doesn’t quite “fit” you—if you were to look at your lineage, might you find you’re only 2 or 3 generations from famine?
For example, if you have an intense fight response, what did your mother and grandmother experience in their lifetime that might inform your DNA to fight to stay alive?
Here in The Golden Path, we bow to these responses—even if we don’t like them or understand them, because we know it’s a benevolent response of our being attempting to keep us safe and alive. On the same hand, we are honest about who we are (now and in this lifetime) and recognize these over-couplings may no longer serve us.
Uncoupling happens on two levels:
Understanding: “This reminds me of that, but I know this is not that and I am safe.”
Staying rooted (or returning often) to the present moment now—in the body (breath, muscular movement, pulse, beating of your heart, orienting to the moment/what’s around you, etc).
You cannot force uncoupling. You can only:
The body updates when it feels ready.
Uncoupling is developmental work. It softens over couplings from 95% intensity to 20% over time. They may still arise, but you gain:
You are not erasing your history—you are outgrowing its constraints.
Most triggers involve multiple parts:
Uncoupling asks:
You don’t need full-system relaxation.
You just need one resourced part.