Camilo Henríquez
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November 26, 2025
At some point, we all look back at a decision and think, “I wasn’t great there.”
Maybe we felt stupid, maybe pathetic, maybe afraid, moments where we acted far from who we hoped to be.
And we also hold memories of when we showed up in the opposite way, when we succeeded, helped someone, or acted with courage, generosity, or presence.
Both kinds of moments exist in your memory.
Both are psychologically real.
But here’s the cognitive twist:
Moments don’t define you. The meaning you assign to them does.
A betrayal doesn’t impact us only because it was painful (clinically, this is an expectancy violation, where the brain predicted an outcome, safety, reciprocity, loyalty, that didn’t materialize), it impacts us because it shattered an expectation our brain treated as fact.
In that moment, your mind is forced to revise a belief system:
I predicted safety here., I assumed trust would protect me., and my internal map of people was incomplete.
Because betrayal is not just emotional harm, it’s a cognitive contradiction with high emotional intensity.
And emotionally intense memories disproportionately shape beliefs.
This is when the mind drafts identity from shock instead of analysis:
“I’m an idiot.”
“I’m too naïve.”
“People are bad.”
“The world is bad.”
These beliefs are not conclusions formed in clarity. They are global interpretations built from a local prediction failure, written under cognitive stress.
In cognitive therapy, this process is known as overgeneralization (e.g., after betrayal someone may avoid relationships entirely or remain constantly alert for harm, as if one event predicted all future outcomes), forming universal beliefs from a single painful data point.
They’re not wisdom, just beliefs formed with too much emotional ink and too little conscious examination.
Positive moments don’t get the same psychological autofocus (this reflects the negativity bias in memory and attention, where threats and losses are prioritized for learning and recall), but they contain crucial cognitive evidence of your agency and capacity.
Think of the moment when someone thanked you deeply for a favor that felt small to you but changed something big in them.
That moment exists because you held a belief that made helpful action possible (“I can intervene here”), you detected a need, you had a personal quality that enabled execution (knowledge, money, physical strength, contacts, or simply the ability to listen), and your values and expectations briefly aligned into impact.
By cognitively analyzing these moments, not to worship them but to understand them, we uncover the other side of the triangle:
Emotional intensity amplifies memory weight, but not truth weight.
Both pain and success are data, not identity.
Growth lives in examining the lenses, not just the lesson.
Excessive or persistent suffering is not a final definition of who you are.
It is a cognitive-emotional feedback loop telling you your mental model of yourself, others, or the world has become too narrow or rigid for the complexity of your lived experience.
Not because you are permanently flawed, but because your brain learned too specifically from pain, your beliefs tried to protect you but became inflexible, and you stopped examining the model‑building process.
The solution is not to delete memories, but to downgrade their authority over identity, and increase your awareness of how beliefs form.
You are not your worst mistake.
You are not your most heroic triumph either.
You are the architect of the narrative your mind builds after both, to the degree that you learn to observe that process consciously.
This is not about deciding who you are once and for all, but understanding how your mind decides, so you can choose clarity over rigidity.
Because balance isn’t a feeling that suddenly appears.
Balance is a cognitive skill.
Try this now: Recall one painful moment and one moment you're proud of. Write down the meaning your mind built from each. Are the conclusions flexible or absolute?
A learnable ability to observe without being imprisoned by your mind’s fastest conclusions.
If these cognitive identity loops interest you, you might enjoy:
For narrative‑based understanding of identity and personal change in line with psychotherapy thinking:
For mindfulness and developing a balanced, observer stance toward inner experience:
Let’s continue refining your mind’s most interesting work.
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