Episodic unpacking

The aim of this activity is to identify and explore the past experiences that have informed your expectations of the current situation. 

You might do this as part of a journaling activity (post-event) or expectation chronicling (pre-event).

This amounts to reflecting on your formative experiences rather than just the current situation. As such, you can use any of the reflective techniques on this site to help you with the unpacking.

• The first step is to explicitly articulate your expectations for the current situation (What did you think would happen?).

• Then take each expectation in turn and ask yourself where it came from. Can you think of particular events or experiences that led you to have this expectation for the current situation? List each formative experience that you can identify, perhaps giving each experience a distinctive name. (What influenced me to expect this?)

• For each formative experience, try to recall as much episodic detail of the event as possible (you could use cognitive interviewing techniques and context analysis to help). (What actually happened?)

• Try to identify how this formative experience led to the expectations for the current circumstances (possibly using cause-and-effect or concept mapping). (Why did this experience lead to my expectations?)

• Explore alternative conclusions that you might have reached based on the past experience (possibly using force-field analysis). (How might I have evaluated that past experience differently?)

• Now consider how these alternative expectations might have affected your understanding and evaluation of the current situation (using counterfactual thinking). (How would I have approached this situation differently if my previous experiences had been different or if I had interpreted them differently?)