Good luck trying to get anyone to have a thorough understanding.
Years ago, I was frequently on the phone with the manager of the racing partnership I was an owner in and did the bookkeeping for. Whenever I'd paraphrase something she'd previously told me, she'd reply with a sharp, firm, "That's not what I said." Then she'd go on to very slowly and distinctly repeat what she recalled herself saying -- which usually, to my mind, was the same thing I'd just paraphrased.
I got fed up with her constant "corrections", so I pointed it out to her. "I'm not quoting you exactly," I protested, "I'm just paraphrasing the meaning of what you said." It bothered her that I was annoyed by this verbal tactic of hers, so she thought it through and told me why she felt a need to behave like that. She and her alcoholic husband had a stormy relationship, and he would often accuse her of doing something different from what she'd said. So, to combat him effectively, she always made sure she chose her words carefully and knew exactly what she was saying, so she could be sure of herself when they later argued.
Once we discussed it, she stopped correcting my paraphrasing of prior conversations between us.
Many of us are desperate to get others to understand us -- understand where we're coming from. Most of the time, we're hugely frustrated that however much someone else might nod their head in sympathy, or say "That's really cool!" to something exciting, we still feel that they don't completely "get it". This is especially true when we want to go back decades in the past and relay some profound event and expect the listener to treat it with the same degree of meaning that it has for us.
Then there's amazing little "miracles" that we try to tell others about. At best, they say "That's really neat" in a tone lacking the enthusiasm we hope for. More likely, they'd say something like, "Well, if you thought you saw an angel form at the front of your car when you're driving through the rain, don't you think that was just the mist looking like a certain shape? After all, you say you were really upset before it appeared, so don't you think you just saw what you wanted to see?"
We seem to consider it our duty to invalidate others' amazing experiences. I've done it myself plenty to dear friends over the course of my life.
Even when we've shared a unique, intense experience with others, we're all seeing it through a different lense. When that plane landed on the Hudson River in 2009, with all passengers and crew surviving, the handful that were on Larry King Live that evening had different experiences to tell. The co-pilot didn't have time to be scared, because he was so focused on reading the flight procedure manual on what to do. A few passengers spoke of the intense cold of the water. One passenger was all smiles as he relayed that he was certain they were going to get out of the situation just fine. The stewardess on the show was thoroughly shaken, freely admitting she was going to need lots of therapy, and spoke of "the water up to my neck" as she was trying to urge the final passengers out of the plane.
I once saw a documentary on plane crashes, and a steward that had been in a crash many years before spoke of how his entire life fell into two categories: "before the crash" and "after the crash". In contrast, top show jumping rider Michael Matz survived the 1989 Sioux City, IA plane crash, along with his fiancee, and they made a decision that they weren't going to let the crash define their lives and never attend survivors' meetings, etc. The very next Grand Prix show, less than two weeks after the crash, Matz and his horse won the event. I bet a lot of psychologists would have a hard time "getting" that, because they view people as forever traumatized after an intense event.
I love the suggestion of the Abraham-Hicks philosophy that "It's nobody else's job to 'get' you. It's your job to get you." What a relief that idea was. No more desperately seeking the right words so that the other person -- who has their own life to "get" -- understands what was going on with me in this or that situation -- which they never understand precisely, anyway. And often nowhere near. Or me trying to acknowledge someone else's recent event when they're telling me All About It, when I'm bored and wish they'd hurry and get to the bottom line, because I already know I don't see their situation as profoundly as they do.
There is such a tremendous variety in this life. We all pick and choose what we prefer, what we discard as unimportant, and what's going to affect us. And we're all so amazingly unique in what we choose. I've no doubt existence would perish if we all were able to convince others to see things exactly the same way that we do. That would result in a unity of non-adaptation, which is the very antithesis of life.
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