Our beings — yours, mine, your disagreeable uncle’s, that troglodyte’s bitching to the clerk about something that’s out of stock at the gas station — didn’t just spring out of nowhere. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Today, I’m going to be totally insufferable.”
We’re all shaped by invisible hands. Past experiences mold us like clay before hardening into who we are now.
Start with yourself. Through introspection, you find that many of your feelings and beliefs are guided by past conditioning. Buried feelings and experiences imprint your character, shape your actions without your knowing.*
The same is true for others. When you try to imagine what hands shaped the clay of other hardened beings, you realize that they too are products of past conditioning and imprinting.
Think of someone who was a negative force in your life. Maybe they were absent, withholding, unkind, or straight-up abusive. Now search for the most charitable, compassionate view of them.
Try imagining their childhood. Imagine them being bullied at school, going home to an abusive parent, then being alone without attention when they needed it most. What happened to them? What did they have to overcome? Have they ever felt loved? Or safe?
What you imagine about them doesn’t even have to be true. It’s not about condoning or accepting what they did (being an asshole is still being an asshole). No need to forgive or seek any high ground.
Just consider them for the scared, lonely, fragile being you have often been. Imagine what shaped them in those vulnerable moments. What reflexes they developed to deflect the things that hurt them most.
They, like you, were shaped by hands they didn’t choose.
Suddenly, it becomes easier to accept others you would have otherwise abandoned, ignored, despised, or kept at arm’s length.
“The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?”
Patricia Lockwood
*Imprinting and conditioning are two processes that shape our behavior and beliefs from an early age. Imprinting is a rapid, instinctive learning process that occurs during a critical period, forming strong attachments or associations. Conditioning, on the other hand, involves learning through experiences and reinforcement, either by associating a neutral stimulus with a meaningful one (classical conditioning) or by reinforcing or punishing certain behaviors (operant conditioning). These early experiences can create deep-seated fears, insecurities, or coping mechanisms that manifest in seemingly irrational or uncharacteristic actions later in life.