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When We Don't Understand

We like things to fit our sense of reality, but what happens when they don’t?

Many years ago, while visiting my parents, they were giving each other the kind of potshots I had grown up around. When my father said, “Shirley, I’ll never understand you.” What I heard was, no matter how much I’ve told you. You just never get it. That was the moment I realized his words were true, even if their meaning had been changed by his tone.

“That’s right Dad, you don’t.”

He was too hooked by his frustration to hear. For me, it was an ah-ha moment when another piece of the puzzle came together. How many times had I dropped into judgment when I didn’t understand someone? It was more than I could remember. And, like my dad, it was dismissed from mind by the conviction that I was right and they were wrong.

It was a tenacious habit that shut down any further investigation into what was being discussed. Recognizing this did not stop me from being hooked again and again and again. What it did produce was an awareness that would come at times after the fact. My mind would be spinning some familiar theme, where only the names were changed to convict the guilty.

• It was evoked when someone’s behavior did not:
• meet my expectations,
• make sense to me,
• agree with my values,
• conform to what I understood.

Eventually the mind opened to not understanding in a new way. It stopped condemning and slowly pondered what it might be like to see things from another angle. It was freeing to stop defending my perspective and stop needing to understand (agree with) theirs. They offered a view that was unfamiliar, maybe uncomfortable, it did not fit into my sense of reality. Could it be as true for them as mine was true for me?

Here are some things that became apparent for me as the mind allowed for a deeper comprehension of how things were for others.

• We each become angry, frustrated, happy, joyous, disgusted, surprised, etc…
• Not at the same things
• Our expression of these things vary from person to person
• We each each have a full range of emotions—that we often justify and don’t examine.
• Our emotions tend to show up, be evoked, and/or just happen. There does not seem to be much choice involved in them.
• An emotional response has a physical element that is experienced, like adrenaline rushing through one’s system. The response is real regardless of whether the stimulus is or not.

Imagine yourself alone in the woods when you hear something you think             is a bear. The fear experienced is real, whether there is real danger or not. (Yet we tend to believe the feeling.)