It is so easy to slip into a thinking pattern that is not working for us.
It is especially easy when our emotions are triggered by interactions with people close to us, even more so if the pattern has been there for some time. It’s tempting and to think that the other person is just a [insert word of choice here].
Falling into a judgmental thinking pattern about the other person can be oddly comfortable and familiar, but even if behaviour from the other seems outrageous, thinking this way is unhelpful to us.
Everyone’s behaviour makes sense in the context of how they see the world and what is happening inside them. If we just apply a judgement (they are just a [ x ] ), then we are likely to keep repeating the same pattern with the same results.
By genuinely seeking to understand the other person with non-judgemental curiosity (however we go about that), we start to understand more about their experience and their behaviour starts to make a bit more sense to us.
This means that we can become more flexible in the way that we engage and communicate with them, we could discover a strategy that gets a different result.
Comments