The Stories We Mistake for Truth

I recently heard a medium on television confidently state that 80% of the population dreams in black and white. The comment immediately caught my attention, not because I considered it impossible, but because it seemed inconsistent with my own experience and with the thousands of conversations I have had over the years with clients, students, friends, and family members who regularly share their dreams with me.

In fact, I could not recall ever hearing anyone tell me they routinely dream in black and white.

As I sat with the statement, I found myself thinking less about dream imagery and more about something far more pervasive in our culture: our tendency to confuse opinions, beliefs, assumptions, and personal perspectives with objective truth.

A person forms an opinion about an event, a circumstance, or another human being, and somewhere along the way that opinion quietly transforms into “the truth.”

However, opinions are not truth; they are merely perspectives…

They are conclusions drawn through the filter of our personal experiences, upbringing, education, wounds, fears, values, hopes, and biases. They tell us a great deal about the person holding them, but they do not necessarily reveal the entirety of what is true.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in romantic relationships.

Two people can share years together, participate in the same conversations, experience the same events, and yet emerge with completely different interpretations of what happened between them.

One person remembers feeling ignored while the other remembers feeling overwhelmed. One might believe they were constantly giving while the other believes they were never truly seen. One feels abandoned while the other feels controlled.

Both individuals are often convinced they are describing the truth, when in reality they are describing their experience of the truth.

This is one of the reasons relationships can be so challenging.

Most conflicts are not disagreements about facts, but rather collisions between perspectives.

We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to convince our partner that our interpretation is the correct one, when a far more useful question might be, “Help me understand how this looked from where you were standing.”

That question does not require agreement or surrender; it simply creates space for understanding.

Ironically, many relationships suffer not because two people have different perspectives, but because they insist that only one perspective can be valid.

The moment we become more interested in understanding than winning, communication begins to change. Our defensiveness can soften when curiosity emerges. The battle over who is right can become an exploration of why two people experienced the same reality differently.

What makes this even more complicated is that we often treat our emotions as evidence.

If I feel rejected, I assume I was rejected.

If I feel ignored, I assume I was ignored.

If I feel judged, I assume I was judged.

If I feel abandoned, I assume I was abandoned.

Yet emotions, while undeniably real, are not always reliable narrators of reality.

They are experiences, signals, and information, but they are not necessarily truth. An emotion tells us something important is happening within us, but not always accurately about what is happening around us.

A person who was repeatedly abandoned in childhood may feel abandoned when a partner simply needs space. A person who was frequently criticized may perceive judgment where none was intended. Someone carrying unresolved hurt may experience a neutral comment as a personal attack.

Yes, the emotion itself is real, but the interpretation may not be.

This is why self-awareness is paramount. There is a profound difference between trusting our feelings and automatically believing the story attached to them.

As human beings, we are often convinced that because something feels true, it must be true. Yet feelings, perspectives, and moods are constantly changing as our understanding evolves. What felt unquestionably true at twenty often looks very different at sixty.

Emotions can be powerful, persuasive, and deeply convincing, but they are still temporary states of consciousness. They come and go, often shifting dramatically as new information, healing, maturity, or perspective emerges.

Our emotions deserve to be listened to, but they do not always deserve the final word.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly cautious when someone presents a complex issue as though it were unquestionably settled or universally understood. Human beings are extraordinarily complicated creatures, and our experiences of life are filtered through countless layers of perception, most of which operate outside of our conscious awareness.

Yes, truth, reality, and facts exist. Certain things happened exactly as they happened. However, the meaning we assign to those events, the stories we tell about them, and the conclusions we draw from them are frequently influenced by our perspective.

Perhaps wisdom begins when we develop the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time: that our perspective matters, but it may also be incomplete.

There is humility in that recognition.

There is a willingness to remain curious rather than certain.

There is an understanding that no matter how intelligent, educated, intuitive, or experienced we may be, there will always be aspects of reality that exist beyond the limits of our current understanding.

The older I get, the less interested I am in defending opinions and the more interested I am in examining them.

Through what lens did I arrive at this conclusion?

Are there assumptions I am making?

Could some information be missing?

If I take my emotions out of the equation and look only at the facts, will I still believe the same thing?

How might this situation look from another person’s point of view?

These questions rarely provide immediate answers, but they often lead to greater understanding and, of course, more questions.

And perhaps that is the point.

When I teach mediumship, I often explain what works for me, but I always remind students that their experiences may be different. We each perceive and interpret information through our own unique lens. I have learned a great deal over the years, but I certainly do not know it all.

We are all individuals having different experiences, drawing different conclusions, and seeing different aspects of the same reality.

In a world increasingly filled with certainty, outrage, and declarations of absolute truth, there is something profoundly refreshing about acknowledging that our perspective is simply one vantage point among many.

Not the whole landscape.

Just one view of it.