Thank you very much for reading my new blog post. This week I want to talk with you about how often we feel offended, criticized or nervous because people were judging the stuff that we were saying or believing in. I am sure you can recall several incidents you having a discussion with colleagues or friends where are you were feeling bad because the other disagreed with your opinions.
Our different world views
We live in a society where there is no uniform worldview anymore. In the past, societies were rather simple. We were sharing much more in the past than now, the dominant values and belief systems together. It was also not very safe to think differently. Publicly speaking about different ideas would often get one severely punished. Luckily, in our modern society, having different opinions and ideas is becoming more accepted. But life became also immensely complex. What used to be in the past as an objective truth, now has so many different interpretations.
There is a real fragmentation of the absolute truth, nothing is certain anymore. Even physics has proven that there is no absolute point of view. Maybe there is an absolute truth out there, but it can’t be observed in its entirety. A complex society with an advanced system of mass communication, where people with many different worldviews live together implies that we are constantly bombarded with many ideas, opinions, and beliefs of many different parties. This means that keeping and defending a strong identity is more difficult than ever.
Our belief systems
When we have certain beliefs and opinions, there are so many people who think in different ways and can disagree with us. So in our everyday lives, it is very common that people with different beliefs are going to question and openly criticize ours. They do that because they think that our ideas are not true or that their points of view are better than ours. When we disagree with each other about a certain issue, we have a discussion about it and we try to convince the other person that we are a right, by using the necessary arguments. The strange thing is that these discussions are mostly not just a rational exchange of arguments, but that they get very emotional.
When our opinions and beliefs are being judged, we take it personally. When people criticize what we believe in, it feels like they criticize us. That’s because we are fully identified with what we are believing in. We are what we think, instead of synchronizing with our authenticity in our heart… our “INRSIDE”. Since we entered this world, our environment already communicated mainly with us by addressing our minds. They told us many things about us, for us to internalize and identify with. First, they gave us a name and later they proposed a whole bunch of things about us that we started to believe in.
These belief systems became our identity and slowly throughout our youth, we started to live less and less from our heart space and more and more from our minds. We slowly lost our innocence, authenticity, and spontaneity in exchange for our egos. When we are living from our ego every communication with others is judged following an identity based on many belief systems coming from outside us. So no wonder that when people criticize our belief systems, that it feels like they criticize us.
We are not what we think
The truth is that we are completely separate from ideas, concepts, beliefs, opinions… We just identified with them. We are not a political party, a football team, a religious order, or a culture. But when people say something bad about the ones we identify with, we feel hurt as if we would feel hurt personally. If we see this in the bigger picture, we understand better why there are so many wars based on differences in political, ideological, religious and cultural belief systems. When we feel that we are under personal attack, automatically our natural defense system gets triggered. When our beliefs are charged, it feels literally like we are in danger because the body is having the same physiological reactions. In other words, we are confused. When our ideology or religion is criticized there is no real danger for us, but still, the body thinks that there is a real reason for getting all hands on deck.
Our body has certain natural defense mechanisms: Fight, flight and freeze. So when we are in a discussion and our arguments are being declined, our body believes we are in real danger and starts a whole package of physiological reactions to start our fight, flight, and freeze behavior. No wonder discussions and differences of opinions cause deep emotional responses and fights. But the truth is, whatever people say about the thoughts in our minds all the instances we are attached with, we are never really in danger… It just feels like that because we rather are what we think, then that we are Who We Are.
Take distance from your beliefs
Actually, the solution to this problem is not very difficult to practice or hard to understand. We need to become aware that we are not our belief systems. Every time our beliefs are under attack, a little imaginary bell should ring in our minds reminding us that we are safe. That we are not our belief systems, but that we are something greater. That we have inherent qualities, talents and our own uniqueness in our “INRSIDE”. So we don’t need to attach ourselves with ideas and defend emotionally what we believe in. When we feel our own inherent goodness, we don’t need to defend it with all our power, ideas that came from outside us and were never ours, to begin with anyway.
It is hard to let go of sources of identifications when we would have nothing else to be proud of, nothing else to call our own. That’s why it’s so important to find out who you really are, so you don’t need to suffer needlessly when people are criticizing your points of view. Of course, you don’t have to reject your thoughts and ideas and you are allowed to defend them without getting affected. To have a practical life in our society, we need our belief systems to function well. But when it’s not a matter of life and death to defend them anymore, we can prevent much harm for ourselves and others… and make even the world a better place. Another advantage is that when we can remain calm and not offended personally when people criticize our ideas, we can remain rational and out of our emotions. This state of being gives us a better chance of winning an argument or a discussion. A little bit of distance gives us a better overview and more understanding of the matters as well.
