A New Discovery in the Search for a Life Well Lived

Several years into working with couples, I began noticing something I couldn’t explain.

People would come into a session caught in a familiar conflict. During the conversation, new insights would emerge. They would begin seeing themselves differently. They would begin seeing their partners differently. Often they left feeling hopeful because something important had become clear.

Yet when they returned the following week, they frequently found themselves back in the same struggle.

At first, I assumed they were forgetting what they had learned. Later, I wondered whether they simply weren’t practicing enough. Eventually, I realized neither explanation accounted for what I was seeing.

Their understanding had changed. Their language had not.

As I listened more carefully, I noticed that beneath the countless stories, complaints, explanations, and observations, their language seemed to be answering the same question:

Who or what is responsible for what I’m experiencing right now?

The people speaking were not consciously asking this question. Most had probably never considered it. Yet their language answered it continuously.

Whenever we speak about our experience, our language often reveals where we are assigning responsibility. Most of us pay attention to the experience being described, while overlooking the attribution embedded within the description. This observation eventually led us to coin a term for something we had never seen clearly named.

We call it Attribution Grammar™: the study of how language assigns responsibility for what we experience.

Consider the statement:

“He hurt my feelings.”

Most people hear this as a straightforward description of what happened. Yet the sentence is doing more than describing an event. It is also assigning responsibility. The speaker is locating responsibility for her emotional experience in another person.

Or consider:

“Because of what happened with my mother, I have a fear of being abandoned.”

Again, the sentence is doing more than describing an experience. It is also assigning responsibility. In this case, responsibility is being located in the past. And because responsibility is being located in the past, the speaker often experiences herself as stuck.

Notice that Attribution Grammar™ does not begin by asking whether these statements are true or false. It begins by asking a different question:

What attribution is being made? Where is responsibility being assigned?

Once I began listening for attribution, I heard it everywhere. People attributed their experience to other people, to circumstances, to their childhood, to trauma, to biology, to society, to stress, to luck, and sometimes even to fate. The variety was endless. What remained constant was the human tendency to explain our experience by assigning responsibility somewhere.

The question was no longer whether people make attributions. The question was whether they realize they are doing so. This is where SAGE begins to diverge from many conventional assumptions.

Most of us have been taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that our experiences are caused by what happens to us. Something occurs and we react. The sequence appears so obvious that we rarely question it.

SAGE suggests that something important may be missing from that picture.

Other people may serve as stimuli. Circumstances may serve as stimuli. Events from the past may continue to influence us. Yet none of these fully explains what we experience. Between the stimulus and the response lies a process that is usually invisible. We interpret. We assign meaning. We make attributions. And those attributions profoundly influence what we ultimately experience.

Most of this happens automatically. So automatically, in fact, that we often mistake the finished experience for reality itself.

During the development of SAGE, we became increasingly interested in a brief but important moment in this process—a moment when an automatic attribution becomes available to awareness. A moment when we can begin to see how responsibility is being assigned before the process has fully completed itself.

Within SAGE, we call this the Waking Point.

The Waking Point is where Attribution Grammar™ becomes actionable. Once we can see how responsibility is being assigned, we are no longer limited to the attribution that arose automatically.

Over the past two decades, SAGE has developed five linguistic shifts that help people recognize and, when appropriate, alter attribution in real time. These shifts are not exercises in positive thinking, self-blame, or denial. Their purpose is to make attribution visible and to provide practical alternatives to patterns of attribution that most of us learned unconsciously and have repeated for years.

The details of those five shifts are beyond the scope of this article. For now, the important point is simpler.

Attribution Grammar™ is our attempt to make patterns of attribution visible.

Because once we can see how responsibility is being assigned, we are no longer completely governed by unconscious attribution. We gain the possibility of greater inner agency, greater clarity, and healthier relationships with ourselves and others.

If you’d like to go deeper into the world of SAGE, we invite you to download our recent paper, The Overview Effect in Psychology:

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If you download our recent paper, you are welcome to join our SAGE Zoom conversations, where we explore how to live a SAGE life every day.