Along my healing journey I was forced to deeply think about how I saw the world and my place in it. I’ve realized that my way of understanding things was, in part, causing me pain.
Out of that self-reflection came my new way of seeing what I’ll call reality. For me, reality is the way I see myself in this world. And then I extrapolate that idea to everyone else in the world, as an empathy exercise to see how it would work.
Before, I saw myself in a world with all the people around me as my reality, and that I needed to fight for the truth. I was always arguing with people, including with myself about lots of things. I used to think there was a global reality and everyone was fighting to understand it.
Now, I see reality as each individuals way of seeing the world. Each person has their own reality. Everyone has their own reality, and only they can update it. This is my version of Mel Robbin’s Let Them / Let Me theory.
In my view, problems arise when people struggle to change someone else’s reality. That’s impossible if the other person doesn’t want it to change. What ends up happening is the person trying to change someone else’s reality ends up changing their own, without even realizing.
Lots of issues get resolved when everyone has their own reality. You don’t need to fight for truth, because you can define truth to be whatever you want it to be. It’s your truth. It’s your reality.
One issue for me is passing of ideas I’ve worked out in my reality as fact. That’s mixing up my old and new ways of seeing reality. An axiom of this view of reality is that what people say is not true just because they say it is, or they are an expert. It’s up to the other person to listen and really consider the other person’s thoughts, and choose to either update their own reality, or discard the information.
If everyone did this, we could freely share ideas. You can only do that if you understand your own emotions and not let others update your reality for you without you realizing.
There are many implications of this view of reality that I have not fully processed yet. So far, this view of reality has significantly improved the quality of my life.