This is Part 3 of “The Blind Spot: When People Are Unaware of How They Come Across.”
When someone is unaware or in denial about how they come across and how their behavior impacts others, trying to explain it to them doesn’t usually make them more aware or change their behavior. So what to do when your partner or someone else important behaves in ways that bring negative results in the world, which they then complain about or want empathy for?
It’s not easy to navigate someone unaware, who doesn’t take responsibility for their own actions; it’s a challenge to stay loving and non-judgmental. The first step, however, is not about them; it’s about you. You need to acknowledge your own experience, to bring self-compassion to the difficulty you experience in relationship with their blindness and denial. And to make space for how frustrating and maddening it is to watch someone who causes their own suffering, refuses to see it, and then wants compassion for what they created. It’s important to be on your own side and not blame yourself for “failing” to make them change. Self-compassion means not taking on what is their responsibility, theirs to change, and not indulging in the habit of self-blame.
Practicing Self-Compassion When Dealing With Unawarenes
Once you’ve allowed yourself to have an experience, the next step is acceptance—that is, to shift out of the “fixing” and changing-them mode. To stop correcting the other person’s behavior, and give up on trying to make them understand that what they’re doing is causing the response they’re getting. While you may never entirely stop pointing out their behavior to them, you can do it less frequently and with less urgency. And, without any belief or trust that it will move the dial.
It’s important to remind yourself again and again that telling them how they behave doesn’t change them. They can’t hear it, and it will just leave you frustrated. You didn’t cause their blindness; you can’t control it, and you certainly can’t cure it. Attempts to get them to see their own accountability just put them on the defensive and make them angry—at you, which is never helpful. They have a story on themselves, a narrative about who they are and how they behave. Chances are, they’re not going to consider that anything else might be true, or that they could be perceived as any other version of themselves other than the one they’ve constructed.
Acceptance and Letting Go of the Fixer Role
At the same time, acceptance includes no longer making the situation OK with other people when it’s not OK, and not smoothing things over to hide the reality from them, so they don’t have to feel hurt, or shame, or look at their own choices. It’s not doing the dirty work to clean up their mess, and pretending that they haven’t caused it. In fact, it’s leaving the mess they created in a messy state, letting their impact on other people sit in full view, unfixed and unsmoothed. The new approach is to let them experience their effect on others without you making it disappear.
Know, too, that when you surrender control and accept that this is who this person is—for now and maybe forever—ultimately, you will need to decide if this is a relationship you want in your life. When you give up the fight against reality, as it is, you are left with different questions. Not how am I going to change this, but do I still want to be here if this is what it is?
When the other person complains about the responses they get in the world and how misunderstood they “always” are, or when they want you to validate their pain and the unfairness of how they’re treated, you can keep your responses to a bare minimum. For example, you can validate that the person they were interacting with did indeed appear upset, and even subtly link that to what came before it. “I noticed that she seemed bothered after you told her what was wrong with her manuscript.” “Yes, it’s hard when how you’re perceived is not how you think you’re being.” “It’s never easy when people are upset with you.” In these responses, you’re validating the situation without joining them in the “story” and meaning they’ve assigned to it.
Setting Boundaries: Protecting Yourself From Emotional Frustration
You can always remove yourself from the conversation when they want to go on about what’s been “done” to them; you can either leave the physical space or shift the conversation. Absenting yourself from their narrative is a powerful strategy in protecting yourself from the frustration and anger that their lack of awareness brings up in you.
Finally, while it can feel counterintuitive when dealing with someone who wants empathy for a situation they’ve set up, sometimes the best option for your spiritual growth is to find the strength to offer them that empathy, even if you have to fake it to make it. While it might be obvious that their pain would stop if they stopped creating it, as I said before, pointing this out won’t help them, or you. It will leave their narrative about themselves intact and maybe even strengthen it, and their behavior won’t change. At the same time, it will make them feel blamed for their pain, at which point their rabbit hole may become a hellhole.
Whether or not someone is causing their own suffering or whether they can see it doesn’t change the fact that they are still suffering. Informing the person that their suffering is self-inflicted will typically cause them to cling to their pain story even tighter and cause them to suffer even more.
Empathizing With Their Experience Without Validating Their Story
Unnatural though it may be, the choice to try to understand their experience, without judging it and with as much kindness as you can muster, can go a long way. A simple “I hear how hard this is for you” repeated again and again can be a succinct but effective reply. You show that you see and care about their suffering, but you also give them back responsibility for that suffering, and for sorting it out or doing what they need to do to stop suffering. Sometimes just trying to understand their experience is the best option. When you try to understand someone’s experience, you’re not affirming or agreeing with the cause they’ve assigned to it. You’re not saying that their narrative on the situation is accurate or valid. By seeing their experience through their eyes, feeling it through their heart, you’re empathizing with their suffering—not their story. No matter how fictional their story might be, their suffering is real.
This is so important it bears repeating: your task is not to correct the accuracy of their story, and not to be right about its cause. Even when you can clearly see that they’re re-creating their pain, they cannot see it, and cannot stop it. Their blindness is just another part of their pain and confusion.
None of this is easy; it takes practice, moment by moment, day after day. You will fall down and get up many times along the path. But each day you will get a little stronger, a bit wiser, and clearer. Keep practicing. The unaware person may never change, but if you want to and are committed and patient, you will be the one to change.