Has this happened to you? You are spending some time perusing Facebook. You are scrolling through your newsfeed from your various friends who all have their own opinions. You see a post about something you disagree with; you leave a comment. Someone else targets a comment toward you; your blood begins to boil, you get angry and leave an angrier comment back. You begin thinking to yourself, “How can this person even think this way?” You come across other posts you don’t agree with and pretty much you are in a fury of frustration, your physical body in a state of fight-or-flight and your emotional self wracked with self-righteous feelings that you are the right one in these posts and the other person just needs to see the light.
This happened to me recently, or a version of it anyway. Just starting to come down from an energizing and charged weekend participating in the Women’s March on Denver, I sat down excitedly to post my photos to Facebook. In the process of doing so, posts came through my newsfeed on the other side of the coin, condemning the march or with offensive meme’s toward people who participated in the march and policies that the march stood for. My anxiety increased, my heart beat faster, and I could feel the heat rising in my face. “How dare someone question the viability of this march! They are obviously wrong and I am right!” I proceeded to write a post to “All my FB friends who think I am whining about the election…” and continued to feel physically and emotionally charged up throughout the rest of the day.
We all have lost our cool when faced with other people’s differing opinions than our own. However, there is another way, and that way is to find inner peace. I know I went off the rails of the inner peace train when I started becoming self-righteous. In essence, self-righteousness is the idea that “I am right and you are wrong.” It negates the other person’s perspective, it leads the thinker to feelings of superiority, and it continues perpetuating the conflict that is occurring and feelings of anger and resentment. The Huffington Post, in its article about self-righteousness, writes about the irrational thinking that is behind it:
All-or-nothing thinking: When one sees things in black-and-white terms and has very limited vision. If something, someone, or some belief falls short of what this individual sees as perfect, he or she sees it as worthless or a total failure.
Over-generalizations: People who over generalize take a single negative incident and exaggerate it. These individuals have a lot of use for words like “always,” “never,” “all” and “no one,” extreme words that by themselves can create radical thinking.
Mental filters: This is when a person picks one or a few negative events and dwells on them to make them look much bigger, darkening his or her vision of reality.
Discounting the positive: This is when the person rejects anything positive related to a situation, thinking that the positives “don’t really matter.”
Jumping to conclusions: This is when a person comes up with conclusions when there are no logical, scientific, or unbiased facts to support those conclusions.
“Should” statements: This is when a person tells herself that everyone and everything “should” be the way she thinks, functions and is comfortable with. People who make a lot of personal “should” statements usually experience a lot of negative emotions like guilt and frustration, or even anxiety. Should statements that are directed at other people, or at the world in general, lead to anger and frustration (e.g., “He shouldn’t think like this”).
Maintaining inner peace, however, is one way to help yourself through times of conflict, where you just want the other person to agree with you and all will be well. Pema Chodran describes inner peace simply and beautifully:
Some ways you can maintain your inner peace during any type of conflict include:
- Step away from the screen! If you are in front of your social media and start feeling your blood heat up, get up, go outside, pet your dog or cat, have a snack, drink a glass of water…then come back to it later and see how you feel.
- Engage in diaphragmatic breathing: Hold one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly and make your belly soft, like a bowl full of jelly. Feel your inward breath pass through your chest and into your belly. Exhale from your belly and feel it pass through your chest. Do this a few times while sitting at your computer, before that meeting where you might have to defend yourself or a decision you made, or any other time where conflict might arise.
- Find an outlet that is completely fun where opinions don’t matter. There is a phone puzzle game I play called Ruzzle. Some of my opponents are my friends and others are people I don’t know; I keep the interaction to the puzzle only and take frustrations out by trying to beat their scores each time!
- Get outside. Touch nature. Look at the sky and the stars. Watch a sunrise and sunset. Ground yourself back to the idea that we are all interconnected on this planet and only here for a very short time.
Further, to keep your self-righteousness in check…
- Invite one person from a different perspective to coffee to discuss one issue you don’t see eye to eye on. Set some rules, share your thoughts, and see if you can list what you do agree on rather than don’t.
- Pick up a book or read an article about issues from the perspective of the other side.
- Send a card to that FB friend or family member who doesn’t see things the way you do that you still appreciate them even though you don’t always agree.
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