I know any one of you can recall a time when you have been in a massive argument with someone, whether it be a friend, partner, sibling, family member. I am going to ask you to picture this fight in your mind...what can you recall about what the other person is experiencing? Can you describe how they may have been feeling during this fight? What were they thinking at this time? Now, picture your experience. What were you experiencing? How did you think and feel during this particular moment?
Many of us will struggle more with recalling the perception of the other person verses the self. We have a tendency to think we know the other side, who is right, who is wrong. We hope to understand other points of view, in part because we do want to come to a compromise, while at the same time feeling understood.
The issue with this is that there is no way to really tell if another person's experience of anything is at all like your own. Take this psychological example. Although many of you know what the color red looks like, you cannot know for a fact whether this labeled red color is what everyone sees. We have come to trust these labels and the inner lives of others. The general assumption that other human minds are much like our own is something we rarely question. However, at the end of the day, perception is a private experience. So, why does this matter? Why would we care to understand another person's perception of an experience? Now that we know we cannot truly ever understand another person's reality completely, what is the point?
Maybe the importance of perception lies not in truly understanding the very reality of the other person, but using your own reality and your own experience to come close. In times of conflict, we want to believe that there is a right and a wrong. We are passionate individuals with opinionated morals and values that have been intrinsic in our daily lives. However, conflict is rarely, if ever, black and white. Most of the time there are gray areas that deserve exploration. Your exploration.
That being said, it is also important to understand our own boundaries in conflict. Overanalyzing someone else's perception or experience can, at times, hinder our own experience. We may get caught up in what may upset someone else, and only focus on compromising for the sake that we no longer want to deal with the conflict itself. This places us in a position to sacrifice our own emotional needs for someone else. Regardless, our perception of our own reality deserves a voice. No one should make you feel as if you do not have one, and if they do, you know a boundary needs to be made. Never limit your own sanity for the sake of ending conflict.
Look at conflict as a chance to grow. #mindovermoment
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
William Shakespeare
"Each person, as life progresses, develops a set of high-level concepts that they tend to favor, and their perception is continually seeking to cast the world in terms of those concepts. The perceptual process is thus far from neutral or random, but rather it seeks, whenever possible, to employ high-level concepts that one is used to, that one believes in, that one is comfortable with, that are one’s pet themes. If the current perception of a situation leads one into a state of cognitive dissonance, then one goes back and searches for a new way to perceive it. Thus the avoidance of mental discomfort — the avoidance of cognitive dissonance — constitutes a powerful internal force that helps to channel the central loop in what amounts to a strongly goal-driven manner."
Analogy as the Core of Cognition - Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts
Douglas R. Hofstadter
