how can we accept other people’s inner worlds?
We all have an idea of what is right and what is wrong. What makes sense and what doesn’t? It also happens that we sometimes we bump into people from other cultures or even only outside of our social circle that think differently from us.
Sometimes we understand this as a fact. They think differently than us and that is okay. And sometimes we take it personally and can’t understand why someone in their right mind would have a certain belief or opinion.
Of course, there are instances in which we believe we are the rulers of good and bad and determine someone’s value, worth and how “good” of a human they are by our guidelines. (I am not talking about extremes here)
The problem begins when we have a hard time communicating with others and opening our minds.
What we know and what we don’t know
Last week I was talking to my therapist about a fight that I had with someone because I couldn’t believe how could they listen to the advice of a person who I consider hateful, misogynist and upfront violent.
The person who I was talking to insisted that they didn’t agree with certain of their beliefs but that they had expert business advice.
I got furious because in this case, I couldn’t see how they could separate their business advice from their hateful views. And some people can. I choose to not support people that are like that, but some people do. Unfortunately (for me) I can’t change someone’s beliefs for my benefit. In this case, to justify the fact that I was “connected” with this “advice person” because this human close to me was.
Another, more general, example could be with communication.
To an argument that I was having about communication, my therapist told me I really will never know how the other person truly experiences every conversation we have or how they experience life. We don’t know if for another person, communication is so dreadful that they feel they are losing an eye and if they are actually physically incapable of communicating. And this goes with everything.
We sometimes take things personal and think that it’s because of us or that we are the reason another person does or does not do something.
But most of the times that is not the case, a lot of the times the cause is very internal to the other person. It is how their own world operates.
The inner worlds of people
As we grow up depending on the things we have been through, the people we have met, the emotions we have felt and the experiences we’ve had, we build our own world. Our own universe and our own operating system. We all have a set of rules, guidelines and understandings of how the world works.
Not very often, we choose to give up those rules in order to understand or at least accept that other people have a distinct set of rules and guidelines. If we do is because within our set of rules we have had experiences that showed us to open up to other people’s worlds.
What is hard about this is that as humans, we seek connection with others. It is part of our survival. To not understand that every person has their world and that they think differently than us is to not accept other people.
There are instances in which we truly can’t deal with other people’s beliefs because we might think they are unloving and hateful and maybe even harmful to others. But that doesn’t change the fact that we need to accept this as a fact and understand that other people’s worlds work differently than us for different reasons.
As if we were children, we often want people to live by our set of rules and by the guidelines of our world. We might take something as an insult on this side of the world, but on another is a compliment. That doesn’t mean that you are right and they are wrong or the opposite. It is just a fact that we view things differently.
Accepting these worlds
To live with peace and without resentment and anger for other worlds, we have to acknowledge their existence and their differences and let go of the belief that our beliefs are always right.
This can be an extremely hard thing to accept and an even harder one to practice.
Keep in mind that acknowledging and accepting other people’s worlds does not equal the abandonment of your own.
I wish I could give you a step-by-step process you could follow in order to open your eyes to these worlds which will allow you to live with more calm and less worried trying to “fix” everybody’s beliefs.
However, this comes through practice and observance of what we do, of the conversations we have and of what triggers this part of us that always wants to be right.
What I can give you is the opportunity to open your mind to this idea and to fully surrender to empathy and acceptance when you talk to someone. Remember that this isn’t about understanding what and why they are saying what they are saying but about accepting that they perceive thing probably completely different from us.
Accepting that fact doesn’t mean that you have to destroy your own inner world to accommodate other people’s inner worlds. This also means that your inner world can be more receptive and open to different ideas, unfamiliar concepts and even different experiences that you might have always thought were too “out there” for you.
I think that the biggest benefit of this is being able to have healthy relationships with other people, as we wouldn’t put all of our efforts in defending our inner world.
Prompts for the open mind
I normally add prompts to the blogs with the purpose of more self-knowledge. This time, the prompts will be different. These are questions to ask yourself on the daily when having conversations with people in order to open up your mind to acknowledging their own world.
- How might this person feel the world around them differently than me? How different might the stories they tell themselves about the world differ from mine?
- Why do I feel the need to change their views of the world to match mine? Am I scared of the unknown or uncomfortable with the different?
- How much judgement am I placing on the person in front of me? How much of that judgment is my projections?
- What fears are coming up when being seen and being heard by someone else? Am I scared they might judge my world?
- Why am I telling myself stories about their world instead of just accepting the fact that it exists and that it’s different from mine?
There is a very thin line between accepting and dying to understand why people say and do the things they do. We might never know that. We might never know the genuine reasons behind what people do or how they really feel. Accept that we know what we know and maybe the full truth is not ours to know.
Observe, acknowledge, understand, and accept.
