Idiots are more important to the world than they get credit for. If you’re not an idiot already, you might want to consider becoming one too…
A key to Marshal Rosenberg’s process of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), is to remind ourselves that all people ever say to each other is thank you and please. Sometimes both at the same time, but let’s ignore Nature’s nuances for the sake of simplicity and amusement.
A please is any request that a person believes would make life more wonderful. All please-s are essential opportunities to contribute to making life more wonderful for everyone. A thank you is any expression of celebration that some of a person’s needs have already been met by the situation as it is.
After several years of trying to incorporate NVC into my own life, it started to dawn on me that many negative-seeming expressions that I had taken for a please might have actually been hidden thank-you-s instead. While I was assuming that people’s negative expressions towards me were always opportunities to contribute to them, some might have come from a covert kind of celebration of needs that had already been met.
By overlooking those hidden thank-you-s, I have possibly missed many opportunities to share in people’s celebration of how I had already contributed to their well being. Instead, I was hopelessly trying to figure out which needs of them weren’t met and unnecessarily taking stress onto myself by trying to resolve non-existing conflicts.
In The Guilt Delusion, I explain how a mental-emotional state of separateness inevitably leads us to divide the world into ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’; the innocent heroes and the guilty idiots. Doing so allows us to still meet our need to love as well as our need to be loved, respectively, even while not being able to consciously experience love at all.
Since we only connect emotionally to the depth that we can recognise ourselves in each other, the only source that can meet our need to be loved is our own heart. However, when our sense of separateness makes it seem impossible and/or undesirable to love ourselves, we have to come up with all sorts of twisted perceptions to serve as proxies for our self-love while making it seem as if that love is coming from outside of us. Either from another person’s love for us, or from our imagination that some morally-discriminating universal law of ‘goodness’ is in favour of our current behaviour or state of being.
Therefore, if someone mentions something they don’t like about you, it might not always be a please for you to be or do anything different. Sometimes, that ‘dislike’ being hurled towards you might actually be expressing a subconscious thank-you for being able to regard themselves a little more lovable in comparison to how their perception of you is distorted in that moment.
For instance, when someone calls you an idiot, their subconscious message might be understood as saying something like:
“Thank you for making it easier to respect myself by giving me an opportunity to perceive an even bigger idiot than what I am afraid to be.”
In that case, there’s no point in trying to make yourself seem like less of an idiot, because that might not be what the other is hoping for at all. If they see you as an idiot when all they need is to overcome their lack of self-respect, they already got what they wanted. Even if you would be able to stop them from seeing you as an idiot, you are not going to please them any more than how they are already pleased.
You can easily test whether this is true: The next time someone calls you an idiot, give them a reason why your actions and choices can be considered smart or sensible instead. If they are thankful to you for trying to ‘solve’ their perception of you as an idiot, forget about all that I am saying here. Then apparently it doesn’t apply to them. However, if they try to refute your argument of sensibility, or they come up with another reason to see you as an idiot, chances are that they were not meaning their expression of disrespect of you as a please but as a thank you. In that case, there is nothing more you need to do to help them.
So whenever someone lets you know they see you as anything less than perfect, just savour the possibility of having effortlessly contributed to the self-respect of someone who is well-adapted to cope with an appreciation-deprived habitat. And aren’t we all, each in our own way? If you try to take the momentary relief from their acclimatised self-loathing away by ‘improving’ their perception of you, you will not just challenge their self-respect, but lose your own by forgetting that your self-respect cannot be found in anyone else but you.
No need to take what others think of you as important to anyone else but them. Which doesn’t mean it’s unimportant either. Active rejection of someone’s opinion is just a sign that it has stirred something else in you. Empathy with their experience doesn’t require you to agree that their issues with you are about you at all. And it also doesn’t mean you have to deny your simultaneous but completely different experience.
If you can’t deal with two people’s disjoint experiences at the same time, then don’t. Two individual experiences will never join together before they are both respected fully as they already are, uniquely. Just take time to be with yourself first and get back to the other when you’re ready to accommodate an additional experience again.
Why strive for a lose-lose outcome by depending on others to always show respect for you when you can simply take the win-win it already is? By calling you an idiot — or some other negative-sounding description — someone just thanked you for received emotional support, while you were only being who you are and doing what you thought was best to do. How can life ever get any better than that?
Who wants to be surrounded by perfect people and feel bad for not being that perfect? People secretly love idiots. Spread love, act like an idiot…