Knowing People So Well, We Don't Know Them at All

How anxiety fills in the blanks in our relationships.

When do you assume someone doesn’t like you? Or someone is annoyed with you?

I’ve been thinking about how anxiety in a relationship system distorts this reality. Because the more anxiety there is, the more we tend to be preoccupied with what people think of us. The more we take a look, or a moment of silence, or a weird sentence in an email, and conclude our study.

This anxiety works against us, because often more contact is what would dispel these assumptions. But contact is often the last thing you want when you feel left out, or assume someone is aggravated with you.

Here’s what I have noticed:

• More assumptions after group interactions. Often when people are only interacting in a group (friends, family, work meetings, etc.), and not on a person-to-person level, it’s harder to be factual about another person’s behavior. It is fascinating what one-to-one contact can dispel or clarify.

• More assumptions after positive interactions. If I’ve had a day where I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from people, you can bet that it’s easier to interpret neutral interactions the following day as negative. It’s easy to get used to those functional boosts from attention and approval, and then have anxiety go up the next day when they aren’t there.

So here are my questions for you this week.

Who do you really think you have figured out?

And do you have quantity and quality of contact to back up your conclusions?

Often these are the people we’ve ceased to be curious about, because we have a story we tell ourselves about them. As I’ve written about before, one that’s full of adjectives and not many verbs.

Maybe it’s somebody at your work, with whom you’ve never had a one-to-one conversation. Or a deceased relative that people say the same things about, so you’ve never bothered to learn the facts of their life. Maybe it’s your sister’s spouse, because she’s always complaining about him. Or a friend of a friend, one you assume doesn’t like you.

Or maybe it’s your spouse, because you’ve fallen out of the practice of asking good questions. Or your child, because you’re so focused on fixing them, you’ve forgotten how to let them surprise you with what they can do.

What an interesting practice it would be do sit down every now and then and ask yourself, “Who do I really think I’ve got figured out?” And then to invite yourself into contact, into facts, into their actual thinking, so that anxiety isn’t telling the story.

To me this is a key difference between a more cognitive approach, where you’d practice talking yourself out of these irrational thoughts, and systems thinking. Systems thinking is more about relating yourself out of them. Change happens in the relationships. In the effort to get more objective about self and others. The only way we can see what’s real is to learn about the past and to show up in the present.

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