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By:  Lisa M. Hayes for Confluence Daily

You Are Not the Only Witness to Your Life

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between the person we believe ourselves to be and the person others actually experience.

Recently, I’ve worked with several couples and families, and I keep encountering something both fascinating and a little disheartening.

People can live through the same relationship, the same household, the same conversation, even the same defining event, and come away with almost entirely different accounts of what happened.

Not just different interpretations.

Sometimes different realities.

One person remembers years of sacrifice. Another remembers years of resentment and obligation.

One remembers being abandoned. Another remembers finally escaping a relationship in which they felt suffocated.

One remembers always holding everything together. Another remembers being controlled, criticized, or made to feel perpetually inadequate.

And each person can be absolutely certain that their version is the accurate one.

I think most of us dramatically overestimate how clearly we see ourselves.

We have access to our own intentions, our private suffering, our explanations, our memories, and the elaborate internal commentary that accompanies everything we do.

We know why we snapped. We know what we meant when we said the thing. We know how much we were hurting when we withdrew. We know what happened ten years ago that makes our response understandable.

Other people don’t live inside those explanations.

They live with our behavior.

They experience our tone, our silences, our defensiveness, our habits, our emotional demands, our generosity, our criticism, our affection, and our absence.

They experience the version of us that actually arrives in the room.

And that person is not always the person we believe ourselves to be.

This becomes especially complicated when our personal narratives are organized around themes of blame, abandonment, victimhood, or martyrdom.

If the defining story of my life is that people always leave me, I am likely to become extremely attentive to evidence of abandonment.

If my identity centers on being the person who sacrifices everything for everyone else, I may struggle to recognize the resentment, control, or unspoken expectations that accompany my giving.

If I understand myself primarily as the person who has been wronged, I may have very little room left to examine the ways I have also caused harm.

None of this means the original pain wasn’t real.

People are abandoned. People are betrayed. People sacrifice enormously for others. People experience genuine injustice, cruelty, and neglect.

But an experience can be real without our interpretation of it being complete.

And suffering does not automatically make us accurate historians of our own lives.

I think this is one of self-awareness’s more uncomfortable limitations.

We can spend years examining our childhoods, naming our wounds, identifying our triggers, understanding our attachment patterns, and developing increasingly sophisticated explanations for why we are the way we are.

We can become extraordinarily fluent in the language of our own psychology.

And still have remarkably little understanding of what it is like to be in a relationship with us.

In fact, sometimes all that self-knowledge becomes another layer of defense.

We can explain our behavior so thoroughly that we no longer feel particularly obligated to examine its consequences.

I snapped because I was triggered.

I withdrew to protect my peace.

I criticized because I was trying to help.

I controlled because I was afraid.

I kept score because nobody appreciated everything I did.

These explanations may contain truth.

But the people on the receiving end still experienced the snapping, the withdrawal, the criticism, the control, and the resentment.

Our intentions are part of the story.

They are not the whole story.

And our explanations do not erase our impact.

I wonder how many relationships might change if we became even slightly less certain that our account of ourselves was the definitive one.

If we could tolerate hearing that someone experiences us as intimidating when we believe ourselves to be passionate.

That someone experiences us as demanding when we believe ourselves to be generous.

That someone experiences us as unavailable when we believe ourselves to be independent.

That someone experiences us as controlling when we believe ourselves to be responsible.

Not every accusation is accurate. Other people have their own distortions, wounds, histories, and incentives for misunderstanding us.

And sometimes the version of us someone carries is profoundly unfair.

But neither are we automatically the most reliable authority on what it is like to live with us.

That knowledge exists, at least partly, outside ourselves.

In the people who have loved us, feared us, depended on us, disagreed with us, raised us, lived with us, and eventually, perhaps, left us.

There is a version of each of us living in the memories and nervous systems of other people.

Sometimes that version is more generous than we deserve.

Sometimes it is less generous.

Sometimes it would be almost unrecognizable to us.

And sometimes it contains information about ourselves that we desperately need.

I am increasingly convinced that one of the most important capacities we can develop is the ability to become curious about our impact without immediately defending our intentions.

To ask someone what it is like to be in relationship with us and remain present long enough to hear the answer.

To recognize that understanding why we behave a certain way is not the same thing as taking responsibility for how we behave.

To become willing to revise the stories we tell about our own lives when new information complicates them.

Because the stories we tell about ourselves can become identities.

And identities can become prisons.

If I am always the abandoned one, the misunderstood one, the unappreciated one, the one who gives everything and receives nothing, I may eventually become so invested in that narrative that I cannot recognize evidence that contradicts it.

Or recognize the ways I participate in keeping the story alive.

I don’t think we need to abandon our own perspectives or hand authority over our lives to other people.

But I do think we need a little more humility about the reliability of our own narration.

We are not omniscient observers of our lives.

We are participants.

And sometimes the only way to see ourselves more clearly is to become willing to encounter the person other people have been living with.

Even when we don’t particularly like her.

 

Lisa Hayes is a life coach, writer, and editor of Confluence Daily, specializing in social issues, political issues, and mental health. Her work has appeared in publications like Huffington Post and  Real Simple. She is also the Communications Director for a local fire department in Mexico and runs a life coach training program called The Coaching Guild.