Our beings, including yours, mine, and your disagreeable uncle’s, didn’t just spring out of nowhere. Nobody wakes up thinking, “I’m going to be totally insufferable today!”
They all have belly buttons. Physically and emotionally, they were also tethered to people they did not choose.
And so it goes that we’re all shaped by invisible hands. People and lived experiences mold us like clay before we harden into who we are now. When you’re frustrated with someone, try to see the hands that shaped the clay of their hardened beings.
Start with yourself. Through introspection, you discover that many of your feelings and beliefs emerged from past conditioning. Buried feelings and experiences imprint your character, shape your actions without your knowing.*
The same is true for others. When you try to imagine what hands shaped the clay of other hardened beings, you realize that they too are products of past conditioning and imprinting.
Think of someone who was a negative force in your life. Maybe they were absent, withholding, dismissive, uninterested, unkind, or straight-up abusive. Now search for the most charitable, compassionate view of them.
Try imagining their childhood. Imagine them being bullied at school, going home to an abusive parent, then being alone without attention when they needed it most. What happened to them? What did they have to overcome? Have they ever felt loved? Or safe?
What you imagine about them doesn’t even have to be true. It’s not about condoning or accepting what they did (being an asshole is still being an asshole). No need to forgive or seek any high ground. The walls separating “us” and “them” are made of stories we can never fully understand.
Just consider them for the scared, lonely, fragile being you have often been. Imagine what shaped them in those vulnerable moments. What reflexes they developed to deflect the things that hurt them most.
They, like you, were sculpted in ways they didn’t choose.
Suddenly, it becomes easier to understand others you would have otherwise abandoned, ignored, despised, or kept at arm’s length.
*Imprinting and conditioning are two processes that shape our behavior and beliefs, particularly when we’re young. They’re worth exploring elsewhere if you have some lingering trauma from childhood. And who doesn’t?
“The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?”
~Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy (Book)
“One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life — to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It’s a paradox, but it works. You sit there and pray for the person you can’t stand to get everything on earth that you would want for yourself, and one day you’re like ‘I don’t feel anything bad toward this person.'”
~Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue (Book)
