The capacity to notice the meanings you build around events, images and relationships, and to revise those meanings when a larger or more accurate frame becomes available.
Meaning-making is the capacity to organise experience into an understanding that helps you locate yourself in what happened.
Human beings do this constantly. We connect events, infer motives, build stories and decide what something says about us, another person or the future.
Meaning can orient action and preserve continuity. It can also become too rigid, especially when a single explanation starts absorbing every later event.
The glossary entries on Meaning-making, Framing and Narrative identity offer useful distinctions. Long Before Therapy, There Was a Story Told by Firelight looks at narrative as a human technology for carrying memory, value and possibility.
The Hidden Hero’s Journey develops this capacity through image, symbol and inherited story, while Reality Literacy keeps the resulting meanings open to examination rather than turning them into unquestionable truth.
