My "defining" is very personal, as it uses all my experiences. Read the current and past abstractions of it here. If you have gotten through any of that, know that that's only my cognitive verbal abstraction, some current, some past. It is backed up by neurological patterns that include orientations and activities, past and continuing, and my inclinations is to get some individualized input from a person that I may frame a verbal, and sometimes non-verbal, response specifically tailored to my abstraction of that person's actions and formulations. Here on this message board, a verbal medium with an unknown audience, I can respond to individual queries with an abstraction relevant to my semantic reaction to the current and past responses of the person in question. General semantics "is" a facet of my symbolic, semantic, and social environment, that I am continually evaluating and re-evaluating, with no, as yet, definitive decision as to its "value" in the whole. If you use the link above you may get some of the content of my formulations. Your experience of what I chose to wrote and how I wrote it can give you another perspective.

We can know that what is said is not what happened, but we cannot "KNOW" what it is that happened, because everything we do know is only our individual abstractions from what happened.

THINGS HAPPEN. PEOPLE TALK.
KNOW THEY ARE NOT THE SAME.

Because we cannot know what happened, we cannot know how it differs from the talk; we can only know that it does differ from the talk. Consequently, we cannot know the difference; we can only know that it does differ.)

1) GS helps to develop self-awareness (pop phrase) that there is a difference between things happening and what we think about them, and which of these we react to.

(We react to our abstractions; not to what is going on.)

2) GS helps to develop the self-awareness that our reactions to things happening are a product of a functioning brain and nervous system.

(The brain is not "in between" what is happening and our reactions; our reactions are the functioning of the brain which processes abstractions from what is happening. - Reactions are "in" the brain as a mode of its operating. "Abstracting" is "in between" what is happening and our reacting brain.)