An Unreliable Narrator
As meaning-making machines with always-active minds, the stories we create about the things we see come very easily to us. So easily in fact, that we sometimes forget that that’s all they are: stories.
One of the first paired exercises Radical Honesty trainers lead with a group as part of an introduction, meet-up or workshop, is one that we call “I notice and I imagine”.
In the exercise, we sit down directly opposite our partner and we tell them something we ‘notice’ about them. The noticing has to be something that we can observe in the present moment, using one of our five senses, and ideally should be something objective rather than subjective.
As a way of helping participants understand what we’re asking for, we sometimes say to name the thing as if you were a baby seeing something for the first time. Then, after we’ve ‘noticed’ the thing in the dumbest way possible, we then add the judgment or thought we have about our noticing: “I notice your eyes, I imagine they’re beautiful”, “I notice your shoes, I imagine they were expensive”, “I notice your skin, I imagine you moisturise it”.
Sounds simple, right? Dumb even?
So what’s the point of this exercise anyway, and what does it have to do with learning to be radically honest with your family and friends?
When I took part in this exercise in my first RH workshop, I was paired with a guy I’d never met before. He was tall, slim and tanned, with a shaved head and looked — to my mind — like he’d done a lot of these kind of workshops before.
As we sat down on the floor opposite each other, our eyes met and I immediately made a whole load of judgments about him. I told myself I knew exactly the kind of person he was, from the way he settled himself on the floor, the way he arranged his hands in his lap, from his clothes and the bracelet he wore around his wrist. He smiled and I instantly judged his smile to be ‘fake’, and him to be ‘one of those new-age phonies who pretended they were cool with everything and exuded zen’.
All of these many ideas and judgements and imaginings about who this stranger was took me less than a second to make, and before we’d even begun the exercise, I’d confidently told myself that I “totally had this guy’s number”.
Of course it didn’t occur to me at the time, but in those moments I was already swiftly and silently “noticing and imagining”, and had been pretty much all my life.
As meaning-making machines with always-active minds, the stories we create about the things we see come very easily to us. So easily in fact, that we sometimes forget that that’s all they are: stories.
Instead of perceiving, we conceive, and then work from our concepts as if they were reality.
Some examples of working from our conceptions might be:
My friend replies to my text message with just an emoji:
I imagine he’s annoyed with me, so I make myself sad and hurt with a story that he thinks I’m just a nuisance.
My wife moves away from me in bed:
I imagine she’s decided she doesn’t find me attractive any more, and I make myself angry and frightened with my story she’ll leave me.
My husband forgets to put a bin liner in the bin:
I imagine he expects me to do it and I make myself angry and resentful with my story he wants me to take care of him.
Understanding the difference between what I notice — the thing I actually heard or saw — and what I imagine — the story I made up about what it means — allows me to create space between the real thing that happened and my seamless ‘meaning making’. And it’s inside that space that I can interrupt the process, notice the story I’m creating, and instead choose something different.
I can choose to connect with the person directly, and check out what’s really going on for them.
From a very early age, something that I told myself — and was told by others — was that I was ‘highly empathetic’. In other words, I was good at interpreting tone and expression and working out what it was people were really thinking and feeling. This was a skill I’d developed as a child as a result of being someone who was expected to ‘know things’ without being told, and of being repurposed as a confidant by my lonely (and often unhappy) mother: someone who had never learned to ask for what she wanted.
Being good at correctly recognising other people’s emotions and then anticipating their needs was how I learned to make myself valuable, and so keep myself safe. As a result, I always made friends easily and became known early on as that most valuable of social commodities: a good listener.
Later on in life I used those same skills to find and keep a partner who, as someone who communicated very little in terms of his emotions, tested them to the limit. I sometimes tell the couples that I work with that I spent the first twenty years of my relationship with my husband imagining what he was thinking, instead of asking him. I told myself that, as I had become very adept at reading his expressions, his tone, his body language, that — actually — we didn’t need to communicate much at all.
I believed that I understood what he wanted and needed from years of observation, and so my ‘imaginings’ about his inner world were no longer seen by me as imaginings. They were ‘extremely likely fact-based predictions’.
I imagine most of us believe we can ‘read’ people — I’ve even met people who believe they genuinely have supernatural abilities and can feel other people’s emotions — and my experience of working with couples (and of my own relationship) has led me to a different belief. I believe that relying on imaginings is counterproductive to genuine connection, and that testing reality, asking questions instead of assuming, and sharing the stories that we’re making up, helps us to create real intimacy.
When I present this idea to couples, and they go away and try it, they’re often surprised that such a simple adjustment to the way they communicate can make such a huge difference. They say things like “it’s less like a load of accusations and more like a conversation” or “it’s like she’s telling me how she feels rather than how I feel”, and I tell them that yes, that’s exactly it. Because we cannot know how someone else feels, and believing that we do — that our imagining is a noticing — often fuels disconnection and creates resentment.
Let’s look back at those three earlier scenarios again, and imagine how they might look if the people in them dropped their stories about what was going on, and tried sharing what they’d imagined and checking if it was true:
My friend replies to my text message with just an emoji:
I tell my friend that when he replied to me in that way, I imagined that he was bored with me and that he finds me irritating. I tell him that I often scare myself with a story that I’m irritating. I ask him if he would be willing to let me know if he feels that way.
My wife moves away from me in bed:
I tell my wife that when she moved away from me I made myself feel sad and scared with a story that she didn’t want me to touch her. I tell her that I worry myself with what this means for our marriage, and ask her if she’d be willing to tell me what she was thinking when she moved away.
My husband forgets to put a bin liner in the bin:
I tell my husband I was angry with him when I saw he hadn’t replaced the bin liner in the bin, and that I have a story that he expects me to do everything around the house like his mother. I ask him if my story is true.
My story as a RH practitioner — and as one half of a whole lot of successful relationships — is that considering myself a ‘noticing being’ rather than a ‘meaning making machine’ has changed me more than I could have ever imagined. I believe that learning to separate the meaning I make from my noticings, and to share both of them, has helped me become a calmer, kinder and more patient human, as well as a better partner, parent, therapist and friend.
And whilst I still hugely value my empathy, and my ability to attune and to interpret other people’s emotions, I am careful never to rely entirely on those interpretations. Believing that I can ‘read’ another human being, and that I don’t need to ask them questions about what it is I imagine, means I’m only ever having half a conversation. But most importantly, it also robs us both of a unique opportunity to truly connect.
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Law Turley is an MBACP-registered Integrative Therapist and certified Radical Honesty® Trainer living and working in the south west of the UK.
