I Didn’t Mean to Offend

Transcript

I was thinking about something that happened many months ago, I remember I was in a cafe or bar or something and I was watching this beautiful woman walk past.

I guess I noticed quickly my gaze made her uncomfortable so I looked away.

From my perspective I was just admiring a beautiful woman but it so happened, I imagine this is what was going on in her mind.

It happened that this woman only had one arm and perhaps what happened was that I was looking at her because she was defective, I was staring because she was a freak or different.

I was actually admiring her beauty.

How many times in your lives do you think that happens where somebody is wishing us well or thinking kind things or maybe even indifferent or impersonal. Maybe they don’t care one way or another and we take it as if something bad for us.

Maybe what’s really going on is they’re wishing us well, secretly.

And we don’t have the confidence or self esteem to notice.

Maybe next time when someone says something which seems unkind, maybe they misspoke. Maybe they had good intentions all along?

It doesn’t always happen, sometimes people do have bad intentions. Many times people just make a slip up and don’t mean to say what they said or they didn’t know it meant something different within the context.

A friend of mine, Jake McCauley told this story. It’s a little dark. He was at some party, a bar mitzvah or something. I don’t know what the version of a bar mitzvah is for a girl but anyway it was a bar mitzvah for a girl.

What happened is he had gone to the bathroom and they were showing this slide show that he didn’t know anything about. He came back out and somebody said something and Jake made a Mom joke about the mother of the birthday girl.

And what he didn’t realize was they had just shown this slideshow of the unfortunate and untimely death of this girls mother.

Of course he didn’t know that, he made a crude joke but it wasn’t badly intended. He wanted to have a laugh but didn’t realize what he was doing was credibly insensitive.

How could he have known? Perhaps people shouldn’t make your mamma jokes because you never know. Even though this was like terrible social error, even though he was still having good intentions. His intention was to spread joy, have fun and have a laugh and maybe the world is the same.

Maybe so many times when we think life is so dark, Grey and serious and it’s actually not like that. People have good intentions and made just a little mistake in their actions.

Maybe they can overlook or forgive those things and assume good faith. Not easy to do!

I have a problem with this myself I tend to take things personally when I don’t have to because there’s always a little voice trying to tell us this is personal, what they’re doing is to attack you and make you feel bad.

That’s not normally the case. People are self absorbed in their own problems and not necessarily thinking how things affect you.

So sometimes in a sense they’re right to do that because they have their own lives to maintain but sometimes they can come across as insensitive.

So what’s the big deal anyway? Maybe we don’t have to take things so personally, maybe we could even assume the best interpretation. Or try to think if this person had good intentions what could they have meant?

We can ask these questions or we can just let it go is another option. Not easy to do. I know it’s not easy to do.

But we can keep working on that and keep thinking for example the beliefs around it. Albert Ellis talked about these beliefs where everyone has to like me or approve of me. This is not a realistic belief. Life is not gonna be like that.

Of course people are not going to like us, perhaps because of what we are or some impression they have of us. When they do say something perhaps with bad intentions well that’s a part of life too.

Again it’s impersonal because they’re playing out their own dramas. Maybe in a sense there’s something well wishing about that, maybe even in the nastiest thing.

Even when someone says something to insult you in a sense that’s a compliment. Do you believe that? I believe that because what they’re saying underneath their words is “You are important to me, what you experience matters to me.”

Otherwise they would never put in the effort to attempt to insult you.

Even the nastiest things might be affirming something deeper, truer or sweeter.

Thanks for listening and have a wonderful day.