The Arrogance of Understanding Everyone

For a long time, I thought understanding people was one of my better qualities.

If someone disappointed me, I looked for the reason. If they behaved badly, I looked for the context. If they withdrew, contradicted themselves or failed to show up in the way they had promised, I almost immediately began trying to understand what might be happening inside them.

Perhaps they were frightened or overwhelmed. Perhaps this was simply how they had learned to survive. Perhaps they did not mean it the way it felt. Perhaps I was being too harsh.

Understanding seemed like maturity, while judgement seemed somehow primitive, and so I became very good at explanation.

What took me much longer to notice was that all this understanding had a strange side effect: everybody else remained understandable, while I slowly disappeared from the picture.

My disappointment became less important because there was a reason for their behaviour. My anger became something I had to regulate. My discomfort became evidence that perhaps I needed to become more tolerant.

The more sophisticated my explanation of the other person became, the less room there seemed to be for a very simple fact:

I don't like what is happening to me.

There is something almost virtuous about being the person who understands. You become the reasonable one, the mature one, the person who sees complexity where others see only right and wrong.

You know that people are shaped by history, fear, circumstance, family, insecurity and culture. All of that is true, and all of it matters.

But there is another possibility that is less flattering.

Sometimes understanding everyone is a form of arrogance.

It assumes that every person requires our interpretation before we are allowed to respond to them. Their behaviour has to pass through our psychological machinery, be translated, contextualised and made coherent.

Somewhere in that process, we quietly place ourselves above the situation, as though it were our job to understand not only what somebody does, but also why they do it, what wound produced it, what fear sits behind it and what explanation might make it easier to accept.

Meanwhile, the other person is simply living their life.

They behave, we interpret. They disappoint us, we search for context. They move on, while we remain behind doing the emotional accounting.

Once you see that pattern, there is something slightly absurd about it.

Understanding another person does not make us responsible for accommodating them. It does not cancel the effect of their behaviour, and it does not turn something painful into something acceptable simply because we can explain where it came from.

A reason is not an absolution.

This becomes especially complicated for people who learned early that being good meant being understanding.

Don't be too harsh. Everybody has problems. Be the bigger person. Give them another chance. Try to see it from their perspective.

There is wisdom in all of those ideas. There is also danger when they are applied in only one direction.

If everybody else's motives are always given context while your own experience is treated as negotiable, you eventually learn to leave yourself out of the moral equation.

You become remarkably skilled at defending the people who hurt you. You know their history, their fears, their limitations and the reasons they cannot give more. You can make a beautiful case for them.

But who is making the case for you?

This is where empathy can quietly become self-erasure.

Not because empathy is wrong, but because empathy without reciprocity has no natural stopping point. There will always be another explanation, another context, another wound, another reason why this particular behaviour should be understood rather than taken seriously.

At some point, the question has to change.

Instead of asking Why are they like this?, it may be more useful to ask:

What happens to me when I remain around this?

That question requires far less psychological sophistication, which may be exactly why it is so difficult.

Do I feel respected? Do words and behaviour roughly correspond? Do I find myself constantly translating what is happening in order to make it acceptable? Am I being asked, implicitly or explicitly, to understand more than I am understood?

Those answers may not tell us whether the other person is good or bad.

They tell us something more useful: whether the relationship works.

There is a strange freedom in allowing people to remain unexplained.

Perhaps somebody behaves the way they do because they are afraid. Perhaps they are selfish, confused or simply repeating a way of relating they have never questioned. Perhaps even they do not know.

I no longer think I need the answer every time.

Sometimes behaviour is enough information. Not because one behaviour tells us everything about a human being, but because it can tell us something very important about what it is like to be in relationship with them.

That distinction changes things.

I can understand you without accommodating you. I can see your circumstances without making them my responsibility. I can believe that you have reasons and still dislike what those reasons produce in my life.

I can have empathy and leave.

And perhaps, most importantly, I can stop believing that being the most understanding person in the room makes me the most mature.

Sometimes maturity is much less impressive than that. Sometimes it is simply noticing what is happening and refusing to argue yourself out of it.

There is no prize for understanding everyone.

And there is something deeply strange about offering the whole world shelter under your understanding while leaving yourself outside in the rain.