Tigersoap
The Living Force
FWIW,
In the book 'Being Wrong' there is this passage I bookmarked because I can relate to try avoiding those feelings :
In the book 'Being Wrong' there is this passage I bookmarked because I can relate to try avoiding those feelings :
A better answer was suggested by Irna Gadd, a psychoanalyst in New York. “Our capacity to tolerate error,” Gadd said, “depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion.” Most of our mistakes are nowhere near as emotionally leveling as the pure wrongness experienced by Anita Wilson, but virtually all of them require us to feel something: a wash of dismay, a moment of foolishness, guilt over our dismissive treatment of someone else who turned out to be right—I could go on.(And I will in the next chapters, where we’ll look more closely at the range of emotions that wrongness can provoke.)
It is the presentiment of these feelings, and the recoil from them, that renders us so defensive in the face of possible error. In this respect, the experience of pure wrongness, although rare, is the telling one: our resistance to error is, in no small part, a resistance to being left alone with too few certainties and too many emotions.
For some people, this experience is essentially unbearable. When I spoke with Anita Wilson, I asked whether her parents (with whom she remains close) had questioned their faith at all after she renounced it.
“Quietly, behind the scenes, my mom can bend a little,” she told me. “But my father is more rigid. He once said to me, ‘If I don’t believe that every word in the Bible is true, I don’t know what I believe.’ And I’m like: come on.
There are all kinds of passages in the Bible that can’t be literally true, there are things that can’t be true if other things are true, and there are things my dad plainly doesn’t believe—about menstruating women and so forth.
But he has to hold on to that certainty. Without it, his whole world would fall apart. He’d go insane. I honestly don’t know that he’s strong enough to handle it.” All of us know people like this—people whose rigidity serves to protect a certain inner fragility, who cannot bend precisely because they are at risk of breaking. For that matter, all of us are people like this sometimes. No matter how psychologically resilient we may be, facing up to our own errors time and again is tough. And sometimes we just can’t. Sometimes we are too exhausted or too sad or too far out of our element to risk feeling worse (or even just feeling more), and so instead we wax stubborn, or defensive, or downright mean. The irony, of course, is that none of these feelings are all that great, either—and nor do they engender particularly comforting interactions with others. True, we will have succeeded in pulling up the drawbridge, manning the battlements, and skirting a confrontation with our fallibility. But we will also have succeeded (if that is the word) at creating conflict with another person—not infrequently, with someone we love.
And, too, we will have succeeded in stranding ourselves inside the particular and unpleasant kind of loneliness occasioned by one’s own poor behavior.