What do we believe about people? Sounds like a question that is too global to answer, but the actual question has context. We have a basic set of beliefs about people. About who they are and how they think and how they act. The set of beliefs we have about people are the parts of us that ascribe motives to other people’s actions. We, as a species, don’t read minds, but we do typically (and I do mean almost all of us) generally believe that we know why someone is doing something. We even project our emotions or the emotions of people from our past onto people. Again, this is normal, as a species recognizing a pattern of behaviour allows us to avoid getting charged by that bull, or eaten by that lion – it’s a survival trait.
I say ‘believe’ because that is what it is; a belief. It is no less a matter of faith than any religion. Unless we have been specifically told by the person what their motive was, we don’t have a clue. Even then we may not have it right, as people do tend to gift their actions with a rationale after the fact.
We can be right sometimes. The plaintive “they don’t like me” does sometimes have some energy and truth behind it, but what it’s really saying is that we aren’t happy with the interaction with them. It means that we have decided that “if they liked me they would do …” filling in the blank with what we most want in a friend. It isn’t that they really don’t like you, it’s that they aren’t doing what you would like them to do in order to feel validated and wanted.
How many times has a thought started with “If they truly loved me they would….”? This is the quintessential indicator. This is the question that sets you up for failure. This, along with any expectation that someone will treat you a certain way, if they have certain ‘feelings’ belongs in fantasy land. It is the indicator that someone is projecting their world view and behavioural model on others.
How often have you had a good time only to discover that one of your friends has left the party upset and angry, and you are surprised that their experience doesn’t match yours.
We want to be treated in a certain way and instead of showing people how to treat us, people often resort to complaining that we aren’t liked, that the complainant is callous, hateful, mean or any other emotion that we assign to people who aren’t treating us like we want.
I’m not saying that when someone shouts at you, that they aren’t mad or angry in that moment. I’m saying that why they are mad or angry is not clear, and something that they may not even know. How often have you gotten angry at a situation and over-reacted, because of other factors in your life? How often have you been angry with someone for something, and everything they do causes you to react? How would anyone know why you were angry in those moments? But people will ascribe motive and character to you in these situations. They will project the sum of their upbringing and experiences onto your behaviour and tar you with the motives of their deeply held beliefs.
In life we spend a great deal of time interacting with others. Much of that interaction ends with us feeling as though we know how people feel. We don’t. We project our emotions on others. We project our experiences on others because they look or act like someone in our past.
Nothing is as it seems. The world and people are full of surprises. It is not odd that we try to fit actions and activities into spaces that makes sense in our minds, but it is not usually correct.
