Housekeeping and Guest Post by Tar Miriel
Hey there! Today I’m sharing a guest post by a regular reader who displayed so much wisdom in her comments on Stop Saying Neurotypical that I invited her to share her thoughts on EoSV. Tar Miriel has a brilliant, insightful take on graciousness and extending kindness and patience to both ourselves and to strangers.
One note of housekeeping, congratulations to reader Brent, who won the August hat drawing. Enjoy the sun hat, dude!
Without further ado, Tar Miriel:
Grace
I struggled with writing this. I asked myself, am I truly the right person to write about this topic? After all, grace (withholding judgment) is a value I find personally very difficult to live out. But then I recalled being told that the best teachers aren’t the people who take to a concept naturally so perhaps I’ll have something valuable to impart.
Most of us have encountered the stories designed to remind us not to judge too hastily - the ones where some passerby vocally criticized someone’s parenting only to be told the unruly child just lost a parent or was recently out of the hospital. Religion, while a source of many societal ills, also not infrequently deals with the necessity of generosity both materially and emotionally.
When we call someone judgmental that’s usually not a compliment, and yet it’s so easy to fall into a judgmental mindset. And that’s true of everyone; no religion or lack thereof, no political orientation frees us from the human desire to judge other people. I’ve spent time among many branches of both the American Left and the American Right and they all use many of the same criticisms of whoever their opponents happen to be. And in most cases I’ve found that being gracious towards the outgroup is not well regarded and being judgmental is encouraged as a means of signaling group loyalty.
To be clear, I don’t believe that using your in-group's belief system as a default is inherently a bad thing. It’s impossible to research deeply on every single topic on which you could possibly have an opinion, so it makes sense that most people outsource this to a group they know they’ve already aligned with on other topics. There are some drawbacks to this, obviously, especially for people who refuse to acknowledge any contrary evidence that’s presented to them, but overall I don’t want to be critical of people for defaulting to in group standards.
That said, I do have a problem with the way people divide themselves up into groups and then sort these groups into Good and Bad. And I’m not talking about calling Nazis bad, because I know how people get about this particular criticism - yes, I am all for calling Nazis bad. But on the whole, people are not Good or Bad. They are people. And most divisions of other people are also not wholly good or wholly bad, but a mixture of the two because we are humans.
But this goes back to the difficulty of behaving graciously, and I’m going to discuss a bit why I personally find it hard because I believe that my reasons are probably universal problems.
It’s important to keep in mind that grace isn’t a single skill but rather multiple skills and most of us could use improvement in at least one of these.
The first thing that grace requires of us is that we set aside any tendency towards black and white thinking. I hate this. It’s so much simpler to think in black and white terms; it’s much more difficult to accept that reality doesn’t work that way. I have absolutely found myself being angry that someone had good points because I wanted to indulge in my feelings and hate them for some reason or other. But no, they had to be complicated and human instead of irredeemably awful. I would prefer the world be black and white, and acknowledging that it isn’t can be very challenging.
The second thing grace requires of us is an ability to consider another person’s perspective. Oh, this is hard for nearly everyone because you simply don’t have the entire context in which another person exists and you never will. Even the people you’re closest with and know the best you’ll always be missing some of their context. So you have to fill in the blanks. If we’re not being charitable then we fill in the blanks with assumed character flaws on the part of the other person.
Much like black and white thinking I find that assuming character flaws is easier than contemplating less judgmental context and I’m not sure I would have ever gotten past that if it hadn’t been for something my mother once told me. She’s very religious and we were talking about Jesus’s command that we love our neighbors as we love ourselves. She told me that her interpretation of that was that we make excuses for other people in the same way that we make excuses for our own failings. We know if we were hungry or stressed or tired and we want other people to understand those factors, but we don’t always accept them as mitigating factors for other people.
I know some people who judge themselves more harshly than they judge other people, but I do think there’s some truth to what my mother said - regardless of how we judge ourselves in comparison to other people we always have much more information about our own contexts than we do other people’s. Even at our most self-deluding we have more information about our own context. Because of that, other people’s behavior may seem completely irrational. It can be very challenging to figure out what could possibly be driving them - but people are rational creatures. Even the people who are considered ‘Crazy’ are behaving in ways that are rational for the reality they are experiencing. The actual underlying problem isn’t about their rationality; it’s about the way they’re experiencing reality.
Note that by rational I don’t mean that there’s no such thing as ethical or unethical behavior. I believe that you can make ethical or unethical choices within any context; by rational I only mean that if you actually see what point A is, you’ll understand how someone got to point B even if you disapprove of the choices involved.
Of course, it’s also important to remind ourselves that many human needs are universal. Even those of us with various disorder labels still need to feel valued or a sense of belonging or security - maybe a particular need is heightened or dampened on an individual basis, but the needs are still there. So while we can’t know anyone else’s full context, we can try to keep in mind that if someone is behaving inexplicably that “this is intentionally obnoxious because they like being obnoxious” is less probable than “whatever their personal context is has taught them that this is the most effective manner to get one of their needs met.”
This is also hard to keep in mind. It’s more reassuring to assume that if someone’s behavior caused harm that it was because the harm was intentional. When we accept that harm can come about even from well intentioned acts then we have to accept that acting on the best knowledge we have and trying very hard won’t always lead down the right path and sometimes we’ll harm another person even though we acted the very very best we could have at the time. That’s a scary thought! I would rather have certainty that if I’m not deliberately setting out to hurt people that I won’t hurt them.
That said, knowing that someone else’s most troublesome behavior isn’t intentional or is caused because they learned a less than productive means of getting a need met is not a reason to remain in contact with them if your well-being is on the line. I still find it helpful to think about their behavior in those terms rather than writing them off as being a Bad Person, but that’s because I think the negatives of slipping into black and white thinking are worse for me than accepting someone is complicated but not good for me.
The third skill we have to keep in mind if we want to be gracious is adjusting our expectations of other people. Expectations are important, but often we base our expectations on a theory of what your average person should be able to do and not based on the capabilities of the people we’re dealing with, and to quote a favorite child psychologist of mine, Dr. Ross Greene, “When do all human beings look bad? When there are expectations we’re having difficulty meeting. And we all look bad sometimes.”
It’s important to accept people as they are. It doesn’t matter if people ‘SHOULD’ be punctual or exhibit greater self-control or have better listening skills or any number of other skills we expect out of people at whatever age someone happens to be. If the person in question consistently exhibits a lack of a particular skill then we need to factor that into our judgment - going back to universal experiences and needs, most people don’t want to be considered unreliable or bad-tempered or neurotic or a chaotic unsanitary gremlin and if they say they don’t care I’ve found that’s often a defense mechanism by someone who doesn’t know how to build the skills they’re missing.
Most of us know all of this - we know that other people are fully human, that nobody is all good or all bad, that we don’t know all of another person’s experiences, that everyone has weaknesses, that intent and outcome aren’t always related. But knowing doesn’t make it easy to put into practice. It’s hard to act on this knowledge. Hard, but important. Grace allows us to solve conflicts more productively while decreasing conflict’s more unproductive forms. It gives both ourselves and others the space for self improvement. It reduces our disappointment in other people for being unable to live up to expectations we’ve placed upon them. It also forces us to assess ourselves a bit more realistically, to the extent that we as humans are capable of realistic self assessment.
Maybe there’s a particular area of grace that you need to work on; maybe you’re more like me and find all of it challenging. Either way, strengthening these skills is worth the effort. Even if we fail more than we succeed, that small sliver of increased success will improve our lives and the lives of the people we interact with.