Letting Go of Certainty

I once spent a week trying to prove to my therapist what a heartless jerk she was.

It started with a conversation about balancing my own feelings with concern for others, typical therapy territory. At one point, she looked at me and said, "Kristin, what you're describing isn't compassionate behavior. It's co-dependent behavior."

Co-dependent? Me?

I'd spent my life standing on my own two feet. I was fiercely independent while also caring deeply about others. There was no way I was acting co-dependent.

I'd had plenty of tough conversations with therapists over the years, but this was next level. I was certain I was right. In my mind, being independent but compassionate made me a good person. Considering others' feelings made me a good person. Being co-dependent? That made me feel like a failure as an adult. I couldn't accept that one of my caring traits made me deficient (in my own eyes).

For a week, I dug into everything I could find about co-dependency. As I cherry-picked points that supported my position, I encountered ideas made me uncomfortable, which I filed away for later consideration. I assembled my findings into an email, edited my angry ramblings into questions designed to make me right and her wrong, and sent it off.

Her reply was disarming. She agreed with many of my observations about caring for one another's feelings in relationships. Then she asked me some questions in return. Could I imagine additional ways of showing that caring? Would I be willing to look at ideas that could transform behaviors I thought made me ‘good’ without losing that ‘goodness’? Is it possible that if we looked at our conversation from a new angle, I might see where we were both saying the same thing, or anchoring in the same values?

Something shifted.

The uncomfortable parts of my research I'd tried to ignore kept knocking at my mental door. My therapist had agreed with the aspects of my position that mattered most to me. She never asked me to abandon a single value. In fact she showed how the things I valued most had abundant space for caring behaviors. She suggested subtle changes and invited me to explore how they felt before committing to anything.

And it worked.

She didn't tell me what to think. She didn't ask me to take a leap that would make me feel like a bad person. Because she offered ideas that overlapped with my existing values to varying degrees, I could explore uncomfortable territory without feeling "bad" in my own eyes. I began succeeding in shifts I'd been trying unsuccessfully to make for years.

My therapist didn't "do anything" to me. What she did was help me identify perspectives that overlapped with my own values—close enough that I could step into a new point of view without releasing my grip on the certainty that I was right… and good. I took my ‘goodness’ with me as I loosened that grip bit by bit until I could let go and genuinely explore a new way of seeing things.

I never had to call label myself in a way that didn’t feel right. I could recognize better ways of behaving without beating myself with a shame stick for past choices. I never had to be bad before I could be good.

The professional application?
When working with divided audiences, whether at a family meal or in a packed auditorium, the same principle applies. By moving away from "us and them" thinking, you can sidestep the "good and bad" binary in people's minds. You can identify perspectives that overlap with current thinking enough that people feel safe becoming curious. From there, they decide for themselves when it's time to explore.

The temptation with urgent issues is to drag people toward a better future. But if you've pulled them into territory they associate with "bad people," they'll sprint back to their previous position at the first opportunity. Because above all else, people want to feel good about themselves. 

So let them.  If you are in a good-faith, curious conversation with someone whose position is the opposite of yours, look for ways of thinking that are close enough to their current perspectives that they feel safe exploring them.  Because we don’t change people’s minds.  They do that for themselves when they are ready.  All we do is accompany them a while along their journey