22

In Retrospect

Here’s something you already know about right and wrong. Normally they’re just two polar positions. Sometimes you can just let them be that. But when you get in a fight, when something big is at stake — like your relationships with Morten and Gilles — you’ll be fighting, and it will feel like a fight for survival.

It’s times like these when the reptilian mind takes over. You become highly concerned with your opinions being perceived as “right” and attacking others who undermine this in any way they can.

You’re saying, “But being right has nothing to do with survival!”

It does. In fact, the mind equates “being right” with surviving. As it develops patterns that promote our survival, the mind deems these patterns to be “right,” and more often than not, it becomes blind to the distinction. Being right — so you think — is the way to survive (even when it is not). Your judgement becomes clouded, your logic fuzzy.

Mind structures are the subject of psychologist Dr. Ron Smothermon’s 1980 book Winning through Enlightenment. That’s the book you and Gilles read cover to cover when first opening up your relationship. Turns out you didn’t absorb even the message set out in the beginning of the book:

“Being right represents successful survival ploys of the past. When they do not work, what we see is a desperate effort to use them anyway because they are so strongly associated with what worked in the past. Sometimes, people will die [or kill] in order to be right.”

Don’t worry, you don’t kill Elena — and obviously, she doesn’t kill you. You both live quite happily, out of contact now, though not too far from each other, in Sweden. (Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?)

In a situation where two people are each, like you and Elena were, trying to disprove the other’s point of view, no one wins. Trying to convince someone else about the “rightness” of your position only means trying to create a situation where you are perceived as superior and the other person as inferior. You both did it — but you are not responsible for her choices, only your own.

So if you find yourself in either position, remember what your mind is trying to do…and walk away. It’s (mostly) not worth it.

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Trying to convince someone else of the “rightness” of your position only means trying to create a situation where you are perceived as superior and the other person as inferior. You’re bigger than that.