The third thing is very hard, perhaps the hardest. There is a third thing we need to do, if we can.

Instead of coming to the other person or people with an accusation, we can come to them for help and ask them to explain, to help us understand why they have said or done those things.

The second thing we can do, when we are ready, is to tell the people who we think have hurt us that we are suffering and that we know our suffering may have come from our own wrong perception. Our practice is to breathe and walk until we are more calm and relaxed. The first thing we can do in these situations is to acknowledge internally that the pictures we have in our head, what we think happened, may not be accurate. Half a century after the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm detailed the six rules of listening and unselfish understanding, Hanh offers a three-step process for correcting wrong perception in relationship conflict and emerging victorious with deeper love:

When you make the effort to listen and hear the other side of the story, your understanding increases and your hurt diminishes. Whenever we see another person take an action, he notes, we must remain aware that there could be a number of invisible motive forces behind it and we must be willing to listen in order to better understand them - not only out of the vain self-referential transactionalism masquerading as the Golden Rule, in the hope that others would be just as willing not to misunderstand our own motives by their perception and interpretation of our actions, but because correcting our wrong perceptions is a basic and vital form of caring for ourselves: To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception. Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. The great Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926вЂ“January 22, 2022) offers a three-step remedy for this elemental human tendency in a portion of his slender, potent book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm ( public library), which also gave us his warm wisdom on the four Buddhist mantras for turning fear into love. This is why without charity of interpretation and without candor - the vulnerability of it, the courage of it, the kindness of it - all relationships become a ricochet of unspoken resentments based mostly on misapprehended motives, and crumble. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)ДЄnd so, sensemaking and storytelling creatures that we are, we move through the real world in a self-generated dream, responding not to reality but to the stories we tell ourselves about what is true - stories at best incomplete and at worst injuriously incorrect, stories about what we do and donвЂ™t deserve, stories the cost of which is connection, trust, love. One fact I have learned about life through the empiricism of living: When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of sensemaking, the explanation we elect as correct usually has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation almost always, that explanation is wrong almost always, the true explanation has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person invisibly to us. It helps to remember that between our feelings and anything in the external world that causes the ripples of consciousness we call feelings - any difficult situation, any painful event, any hurtful action of another - there lie myriad possible causal explanations. The explanatory contexts in which this tendency manifests today may be different, but it manifests just the same - especially in our interpersonal relationships, where so much of the correct frame of reference that is the other personвЂ™s inner reality is invisible to us. How humbling to consider that what is cognitively true of our ancestors - who, lacking a knowledge of astronomy as the correct frame of reference for planetary motion, explained eclipses as acts of god and comets as omens of ill fortune - is as true of us. One fact that never fails to astound me: Despite the immense cultural changes and leaps in knowledge over the epochs, the human brain - that crucible of consciousness, roiling with the psychologies that govern the behaviors we call human nature - has remained virtually unchanged for the past hundred thousand years.

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