“He gets it all wrong.” How to find a common language?

The problem that arises in this connection lies rather in the field of communication. It’s not about how others think, but how we communicate with them. Because when we think that they are wrong, we have unpleasant feelings for us – irritation, annoyance, indignation, and sometimes real anger. We want to convince them, to explain to them that they are wrong. We want to fix them. And they don’t want to fix it. And at the same time, we are sure that they are absolutely right, but we perceive everything in a wrong way.

This is the main problem with which clients turn to a psychologist. Their request often sounds like this: how do I change it? I have a communication partner – husband, wife, mother, child – and he is “wrong”. Advise me what to do to make it right?

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• To whom information, to whom – communication

There is one point that you can catch on to – this is the question “What should I do?”. The one who complains always has to do it. Even if he complains about the other, he still has the problem. So what is it, our problem, if we complain that the other perceives the information incorrectly?

First, we have unpleasant feelings. “Wrong” means “different than me.” If someone thinks differently than me, then he is not like me. And this is worrisome. Because then I don’t know what to expect from him. His actions are unpredictable. I don’t know how he will behave. Maybe his behavior will be dangerous to me, hurt me.

Secondly, we have to take actions that we did not want and did not plan to do, but are forced by circumstances.

A household example – my old mother heard enough of television advertising and bought a super-expensive medicine for all diseases in the world. She spent her entire pension on this purchase. And I can’t leave her hungry, now I have to make up for this lack of funds. And I was going to spend my budget in a completely different way. Or this medicine turned out to be not just useless, but harmful – and now you need to treat your mother, look for doctors … This happens with close relatives.

Another example is a longer distance, say a neighbor. What can he do about misunderstood information? Go to war with dissidents, make a scandal with assault and just quarrel with me. And this is unpleasant – to be in a quarrel with a neighbor! Because again, even less pleasant actions may follow, and the situation itself is dangerous: I live with a person at war.

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• Persuasion can be learned

There is discord with loved ones. Now we see a lot of this – relatives quarrel over political differences, stop communicating. And thus they lose each other’s support and experience stress. The other side of the question is how do we perceive information in general? Why do two people interpret the same message differently?

Every adult has their own belief system. It develops over the course of a lifetime. To a large extent, it is based on the accepted opinions of significant elders – most often parents. “I believe in something simply because my mother believed so.” The media also acts as a global parent, and from them we also derive many of our beliefs, which we internalize without criticism. And only some of our beliefs really belong to ourselves – these are generalizations that we have made on the basis of our own experience.

The belief system is also a powerful filter for all incoming information. What coincides with the prevailing beliefs, we evaluate as correct. What doesn’t match is wrong. And some information is not perceived at all. They simply do not exist for us.

Belief systems can be broken and can be changed, but this is not a matter of one minute. And it certainly does not happen instantly as a result of the fact that “I said, and now you have to think as I said.”

Our perception is also affected by our attitude towards the other from whom we receive information. If we trust him, then the information received from him tends to be considered correct. And even if it does not quite coincide with our belief system.

So, we have designated the problem of “incorrect” perception of information by others as our problem of communication with them and considered – in a simplified form, of course – ways of perceiving information. And what do we do with all this? How to behave at the moment when we meet with this “wrong” other?

First of all, we can assess the state of our interlocutor. Perhaps he is calm and confident and just thinks differently than we do: he has a different belief system. Or he is weak and confused, uncritical and because of this is subject to external influences – this happens with elderly relatives and children, but an adult can also get into such a situation when he is stressed. It should be taken into account that many people are now under stress due to political and economic instability. Then we can help them take a more adult position, learn to critically evaluate what they see and hear, develop a system of reality testing based on experience, organize a research process. This will require time and patience from us, so it is useful to evaluate our own strengths. At the same time – or instead – we can protect the other from inappropriate actions: for example, from buying expensive drugs or fighting with ideological opponents.

We can also allow the other to have beliefs that are different from ours and not fight them. We can agree: we think differently, but we both want to maintain a good relationship and for this we will avoid certain topics in conversations.