Why is He or She So False and Misleading?

Caring for our attributions, why is it that we second-guess so much? Many times people cannot share as they’d perhaps like to due to their own lack of self-esteem. It isn’t as much to do with them not trusting us as we think it is. They, indeed, perhaps, struggle to trust their true selves – as we all tend to do.

As people we’re naturally are so tempted to try and understand life through assumptions. We want to fill in the gaps in our understanding, and we have the most creatively ‘natural’ ways of doing this very thing.

When people mislead us or don’t tell us the full story—omitting what are to us, important details—we have to fight the tendency to think poorly of them, especially as we recoil in our hurt. These have affected our trust of them, or so we’re inclined to think.

It is good to be aware of this phenomenon. Only with awareness are we able to temper down our instinctual responses in the negative to what we’ve seen.

Enters – at This Point – Does the Logical Mind

Awareness is often the most critical starting point. When we’re suddenly aware of our dramatic leaps-of-logic we can wonder back to how we got there.

Here’s a moment of chiding inner embarrassment, but it’s essential in fixing our thinking.

There are truly many reasons why people find it hard, or even impossible, to be honest, or why we as people fail to trust as perhaps we could or should. The reasons are not as important as perhaps just the fact.

Falsity will become our communications more than congruence, truth and authenticity—until, that is, trust is secured, and that can only occur on a rapport-by-rapport basis.

Understanding, Always

All we can do is accept these facts, understanding that people are not generally ever vexatious in their dealings with us, not those who generally care.

This understanding promotes empathy and perhaps even our own reflections regarding these very things—our own incongruence and failures to trust; misleading people. Here we have seen the plank in our own eye and what a revelation of God that is, as we might see fairly the real size of the little speck in the other’s eye (Matthew 7:1-5). We’re suddenly not so quick to judge.

So many times there are answers there when we dig a little deeper with the right intent of mutual or overall understanding. People’s mistrust is generally very well understandable.

Blessed, really, are those enquiring of their assumptions.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.