truly like. to have a successful mutually beneficial interpersonal relationship with someone its very important that you believe that they are a full real entire person just like you are, really believe that. and then you have to successfully communicate that to the other person. and they have to believe the same thing, AND successfully communicate it to the other person. and then you have to decide how you want your relationship with each other to be and you have to agree on most things, or else it doesn't make sense. and you have to actually believe it and not just want to believe it in order to be able to believe you yourself are a good person. you have to actually believe it.
i think those are most of the. the ones you can't do without, if you want it to be relationally healing or whatever. people will be able to tell if you do not really think they are a person with interiority in the way they are. they will not like it.
most of us flatten others to some degree and we do this bc we need psychologically to be able to justify the fact that our brains only have so much social categorization capacity. if you're doing it to the people directly around you, they'll notice.
I didn't understand why people were reacting to me the way they were until I understood what my behavior had been saying to them! then it made perfect sense and I was like "oh shit that's not what I wanted to communicate to you at all, geez, I have to get better at understanding this language so I can make sure I'm showing the things I believe with my behavior in a way this person will understand and that will not instead harm them! i definitely do not want to be harming people but I was sort of unpersoning this person to justify how I was acting because I was making choices based on what I wanted and not what they wanted. if someone asked me straight up "do you want to have interpersonal relationships where you're always making choices based on what you need and discounting what the other person needs and wants?" i would say "no! i don't want to have those kind of relationships! i value not hurting people!" but in those individual instances I was ignoring behavioral communication that I was receiving to just go ahead with what I wanted.
i don't think it's evil to say things like "look buddy I don't care if you're having a bad day, I really did NOT like being spoken to that way" to dismiss someone's feelings. but if someone you claim to care about is behaving in a way that YOU CAN READ as hesitant or reluctant to bring up what you are doing and how it is hurting them, then you better respond to that by saying "hey if you don't want the same things that I want, that's okay. i just want to know the real answer so we can be on the same page. i really value you and it is important to me that you be able to trust me. i have not behaved in a way that has made you feel that I am trustworthy. i will behave differently in order to communicate that to you better"
like sometimes someone's answer is truly "well I don't really see you as a full human person with interiority" like for real for real. and boy howdy that can sure change your interactions if you can read it, right? like when a doctor has shown me that I can't trust them to believe I am a person who is accurately reporting what is going on with my health, that changes EVERYTHING about the interaction. And if someone i LIKE and who I VALUE tells me that they weren't considering me to be a real person, that's a whole different thing.
I'm not saying everyone is always telling you exactly how human they see you as at all times. but like. its there subconsciously! some people are fine with this and some people grapple with it. i grapple with it a lot. its really hard right? sometimes not seeing yourself as uniquely different is hard. sometimes you know that it is important that you see others that way all the time because it's what is true; we are all human beings. no one can value every single other human the same as themselves or the people they love because we would go insane I think. sometimes it's easy to slot someone you like a whole lot into that grouping a little bit, sometimes, because you want something. sometimes you want that person to play a role in your life that they are not prepared and don't want to play. if people feel like their needs don't matter to you as much as your own, they will not feel fully safe in the relationship, and they'll be right.
this can describe a lot of dynamics and obviously one end of the spectrum is abuse but stuff that isn't abuse can also involve an amount of doing this. its just that the amount and kind of harm it causes depends on the specific circumstances in each case.
this is my most truest hottest deepest cptsd hack. all trauma is relational. you have to regain your own personhood not by denying the personhood of others, but by believing in the personhood of the people around you. and then include yourself.
now maintain that.
that's my ego death recipe! enjoy
this bit
sometimes someone's answer is truly "well I don't really see you as a full human person with interiority"
is sooo difficult to confront when you are the one doing this because you've been conditioned to believe thats how everybody is interacting. like as a child I struggled to feel seen + understood as a real person by nearly everyone around me, and I think ultimately that led to a rejection of my own responsibility to see others as whole people in their own right. I started to assume that all my social interactions would involve my personhood being ignored and by assuming that I was implicitly refusing to see others as people themselves! So no wonder I was never overcoming the canyon between myself and others and felt incredibly alone.
Over-extrapolating a perceived pattern like that is very easy to do I think. I only interrupted that tendency in myself after fully leaving home and my social context (and growing up lol). And even then it wasn't like a switch flipped, it took practice and commitment to trying to see people as people, and the good luck to meet people who were also trying to connect on that level.
yes yes! I think most people who habitually do this have been taught that how you get your own needs met involves dehumanizing others/denying that they have needs that are as important as your own. I grew up being the only person who would consider my own needs so it made sense for me as a child in that situation to be able to disregard the humanity of the people controlling me to prioritize my own narrative. however! ☝️ ONCE YOU ARE ADULT interacting with PEERS this becomes unfair and harmful! you HAVE to stop treating the people you love like your abusive parents. has been my takeaway. sooooo many of us have noooo idea that is what we are doing when it is absolutely what we are doing. we ascribe people who we feel our selfhood threatened by for whatever reason as having some authority we are justified in resisting, even when that is absolutely not at all the case and we in fact simply don't know how to navigate stressful situations where that ISN'T the case.
