Guessing what the puzzle looks like when you haven’t got all the pieces means you end up with something that feels right, but may be far from the truth.
That isn’t rocket science. But unwittingly, we live out lives in the fantasy that we know what the puzzle looks like, even when we don’t have all the pieces. And we behave out of “knowing” what the complete picture is, not even realizing that we have filled in the blank spots in the way that makes the best sense. Best sense doesn’t mean accurate.
Case in point: I LOOOOVE cherries. They are my favorite fruit. This is cherry season, and I splurge on cherries, buying a container from Cost-co, and eating little else for days. Love them. I. LOVE. CHERRIES. Yum.
When I was young, cherries were a rare treat…very rare. There might be one small bowl for the whole family once in the summer. They were like red gold. So, when I could only pick 5 cherries to eat as my share, I would very carefully select the ones I thought would be the tastiest. That meant the deepest, darkest, black-red cherries I could find in the bowl. The bright red ones that were almost pink were quite beautiful, but tart, and a little crunchy—and to be avoided when you had precious few berries to quench the appetite.
My mom sold me on that. I’ve been looking for the deepest colored cherries possible for years when I buy them in the store.
I was at Cost-co this week and looked for cherries. No red ones. Boo.
But there were the yellow-red Ranier cherries. I was sorely tempted to go without cherries because these cherries, well…they just look….wrong. They look like they won’t be tasty, because they defy my “yummy-cherry rules”. They look like they will be sour, and bitter, and unripe.
However, I was talking with someone the other day who raved about these yellow Ranier cherries, and so, as skeptical as I was, I decided to give them a try.
Skeptical no more. Fallen in love with Ranier cherries—yellow gold. My perception that cherries had to be dark to be sweet doesn’t fit with my new understanding of cherries. Ranier cherries are yummy, even though yellow. Who knew? It still tricks my mouth as I was a bowl and try the first one of the day and it gushes with yumminess.
Turns out that when I made my policy on “deeper red cherries are yummier”, I was operating on partial information, never having met a Ranier cherry before. I had to reconfigure my thinking on that one. Turns out my assumptions based on my limited fruit knowledge very nearly had me missing out on one of the highlights of my summer (yes, cherries are a genuine summer highlight for me).
Another case in point: I was speaking with a friend who was talking with her friend. This friend adopted a beautiful toddler from Africa. Adorable little guy. As he gets older now and he has learned English, they have spoken with him about his memories of his home country, and of meeting his new parents, and of travelling to Canada. One of the things he remembers is that the first day they met him, they rubbed him with a white substance all over his body.
They were white, the substance was white. As a small child, he put “2 and 2 together” and concluded that they were making him white to be like them. Pretty clever thinking for a small child who doesn’t understand the language, and is trying to make sense of things—he is putting together a puzzle without knowing all the pieces and coming up with a logical picture that his new parents are trying to change his skin color to be like theirs.
Ouch, though. What a painful thing to hear that this soul was thinking.
What was really happening was that they were putting on cream that were told was necessary to ensure that he would be healthy, and wouldn’t bring home any skin disorders or microscopic creatures that tend to exist in tropical climates. They wanted him to be healthy.
They loved him—the whole package, including his browned-ness, and wouldn’t have wanted him any differently.
Another case in point: I work with couples in crisis. Very typically, one partner will see a behavior, tell me what it means, and be very hurt by that meaning.
Example #1: At most every disagreement, he leaves. Walks away. She “knows” it’s because he doesn’t care about their relationship, and doesn’t want to invest in the concern she has.
And she weeps at the sense of abandonment.
What she doesn’t know is that he becomes internally highly agitated when he feels like he is letting her down, when he senses he is “screwing it up” in a way that is upsetting to her. That internal agitation carries with it a sense of failure and shame that is almost intolerable, and so he leaves the situation to escape the internal awfulness that he can’t bear to feel.
Hard, if not impossible, to know this by watching his behavior, so she works to put “two and two” together, in a way that makes sense to her. Thing is, even if she asks him what’s up, he may have trouble explaining himself to her. He may himself have trouble figuring out why he leaves without someone to help him sort out and slow down his inner reactions so he can figure himself out. He does know he cares and wants her to be happy—but there’s no way to convince her of that because she’s already decided how he feels. Talk about tricky sticky situations, eh?
Example #2: She’s had an affair. Was unfaithful. Cheated. Betrayed his trust and ripped his heart out. He hurts. He wants to talk about it, needs to ask questions about it, needs to hear how sorry she is, what she learned from it, how she would never do it again. She’s cheerful, chipper, and ignores his pain—clearly she doesn’t think her infidelity was a big deal, and doesn’t care he’s hurting.
Guess again.
I have met women in this situation that are horrified at their actions. They have violated their own personal code of conduct; crossed lines they promised themselves they would never cross; looked to see a profound level of excruciating pain in his eyes, in the eyes of someone who has long been a good friend and close lover—to know that that pain was created by themselves. They’ve shattered their own sense of integrity in a way that brutally hurt someone they care deeply about. Those are unbearable feelings to face, shaming to have the wounded partner bring up, and has a woman do anything to change the topic, to “cheer the other up” with jokes and frivolity. Not because the infidelity doesn’t matter…but because of how very, very much it does matter.
Sometimes what seems obvious as the meaning of another’s actions isn’t actually the case. Sometimes it’s hard to see that there might be another way of seeing it. Sometimes it’s ones’ own internal realities that “clinch” the meaning that is assigned to it, and reacted on, regardless of what the other person is really feeling.
What you know isn’t always complete. There is information you may not have access to, that can convincingly change your understanding if you allow yourself to embrace it. And in relationships, the stakes are generally a lot higher than with fruit. (Even though a great cherry is truly delicious. Just saying).
For relationships to be authentic and move forward in a way that is truly respectful of each person, it is essential to check those understandings out, hold them loosely to allow for a different interpretation and understanding, to enlarge the understanding. To allow the other person to feel what they are really feeling, rather than be assigned a position by yourself. Tough stuff. But worth it.
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