There is an old Taoist story, retold by the philosopher Zhuangzi.
A man is crossing a river at dusk. Another boat drifts into his and knocks it hard. If he looks up and sees the boat is empty, he feels a flash of annoyance, then lets it go. He simply steers around it. But if he looks up and sees someone rowing it, something else happens entirely. He shouts. His blood rises. The very same collision now feels personal, and he carries it with him long after the boats have parted.
Same event. Two completely different reactions.
The wood hitting the wood never changes. What changes is what we believe about the person we imagine is holding the oar.
Every one of us in this community carries a full caseload, a full inbox, and often a household on top of it. In that kind of life, reactivity is expensive. Irritation costs energy. Defensiveness costs energy. And most of us are spending far more of both than we need to, because we are responding to boats we have quietly decided are not empty.
Here is the deeper piece, and it is worth sitting with. None of us were raised by perfectly attuned people. No parent is endlessly calm, endlessly present, or endlessly able to meet a child exactly where she is. That is not a story about blame. It is simply how emotional patterns move down a family line, quietly, long before any of us had language for it.
The physician and author Gabor Mate has a name for what this leaves behind: small t trauma. Not the single catastrophic event, but the accumulation of ordinary moments of not being fully seen, soothed, or believed. Over time, those moments write a few quiet beliefs into us. I am not enough. I am too much. I cannot trust. I have to earn love.
We do not walk around thinking these sentences. We walk around feeling them, every time someone’s tone, silence, or email lands the wrong way.
That single shift, from the event to the meaning we assign it, is where our power either stays with us or quietly leaves us. This is why we get irritated. This is why we get defensive. Not because of the event itself, but because of the meaning we assigned to it.
Think of the opposing counsel whose email tone makes your jaw tighten before you have even finished reading it. Or the partner whose feedback style leaves you replaying the conversation at midnight. Or the client who raises his voice on a call.
These reactions are rarely random. The people who unsettle us most often land directly on an old, small t wound, one formed long before we ever met them. What feels like “this person is against me” is frequently closer to “an old wound just got touched, and my nervous system remembers this feeling.”
That does not excuse genuine mistreatment, and it does not mean every difficult person is simply misunderstood. It means the intensity of our reaction is not always proportional to what actually happened, and that gap is worth noticing.
If you believe everyone is out to get you, you respond with defense, control, and anger, and you end the day depleted.
If you can hold the possibility that the boat is probably empty, that the sharp email was written at midnight under pressure, that the curt reply was not really about you, you respond with steadiness and curiosity, and you keep your energy.
Both responses are available to you at the exact same moment for the exact same email.
The next time something lands wrong, before you reply, before you vent, before you decide what it means:
Pause. Take one breath before you speak or send the message.
Ask. What am I making this mean about me?
Separate. The event is one thing. Your interpretation of it is another.
Choose. Pick the meaning that keeps your energy with you, not the one that hands it away.
The boat is usually empty. The power was always yours.
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