Understanding VS Accepting
As part of my daily routine I observe people, including myself. While doing this I try to develop for myself a habit of asking additional questions so I can have a better understanding of what might go on in my observations. Because of this, I’ve noticed something interesting: even though I can logically understand something, I just can’t accept it because it doesn’t feel right for me.
Why is this happening? What’s so powerful that our own logic can’t get through? The answer is our unconscious. When we have a powerful belief about something, almost nothing can convince us that it’s not true even if the arguments seem to be equally powerful from the outside. A powerful belief is deeply embedded into our unconscious and whenever we encounter something that seems to be a threat to it, we’ll get angry.
This might be why we get angry when talking to someone. In our random talks, the other one can say something that goes against one of our strong beliefs and we’ll be “triggered”. The problem is that the person we were talking to has no idea about this and because he/she can’t understand our reaction, he/she will get angry as well.
Since this cannot be changed from the outside, it should be change within us if we want to control it. My suggestion is that in the moment we notice that we start getting angry, we should ask ourselves if we’re overreacting or if that thing is that important to us to worth starting a fight.
When we’re talking to someone and we see that we can understand their point of view, but we just can’t accept it, I suggest we should tell ourselves that everybody has the right to have their own point of view and that people are different. A forced empathy might be good as well. We can ask ourselves: what would we do and how would we feel if someone would verbally attack us “out of nowhere”? (it’s out of nowhere because the ones we’re talking to can’t understand why we got upset and they would feel attacked and this might start an unwanted fight).
What do you do to prevent unwanted fights with the ones around you?
