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When someone in your life—family, friend, or foe—is behaving in a way that doesn’t seem to make sense, it can leave you frustrated. Perhaps they are doing something that goes against their own best interest, so much so that the situation looks a little crazy. Maybe they are missing an amazing opportunity or choosing a path that makes things harder for them and everybody else. Perhaps they are making a decision that ignores a glaring imbalance that you can clearly see, or they are behaving in a way that makes a bad situation even worse.
Whatever the reason, when this happens, it can leave you ruminating at night for weeks—and it happens all the time in our lives. We see it with our children, siblings, partners, neighbors, co-workers—and even people we barely know, like our kids’ coaches or our hairdresser
So, how do we cultivate understanding?
Usually, when it does, two things can happen—sometimes both at once:
1. We can become embroiled in the situation ourselves.
2. We can find ourselves losing sleep over it.
But there is also a third thing that can happen:
3. We can pause and consider the fact that there is likely something enormously important that we don’t know about.
Yes, our knee-jerk reaction to the unhelpful behavior of others is often to insert ourselves in some way to “fix” the situation and/or to endlessly complain or ruminate about it.
Or…we can pause and turn our contempt into curiosity.
I’ve learned that whenever I feel my frustrations rising with someone, it’s best to quickly remind myself that there is probably something very big influencing the situation that I simply don’t know anything about. It could be a mental health issue; there could be a dangerous situation brewing behind the scenes; it could be that they have a general health issue, or another massive burden that I don’t know about.
Living with some ease about the behavior of others is like putting together a puzzle. If the pieces of the puzzle that I have don’t complete the picture in a logical way, then I force myself to simply pause, and then think about why this might seem so crazy. There could be any number of explanations, but the most likely is that I don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle.
Bottom line: When someone’s responses or actions don’t make sense at all, it’s on us to be patient, curious and compassionate. They most likely are not a bad person with bad intentions; it is far more plausible that we don’t know something that is critical to understanding their situation.
If this sounds helpful, relationship expert Andy Chaleff shared many other freeing perspectives in our Conspiracy of Goodness Podcast episode, Fresh Remedies for Relationship Struggles with Andy Chaleff (Episode #150)
To live with less fear and more joy in all our relationships, we’ve got to cultivate our sense of ease, and learn to let things go until the truth reveals itself.
Stay open, curious, and hopeful!
Dr. Lynda Ulrich
