The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Other People

We are remarkably quick storytellers.

Someone is late, and we think they don’t respect our time. A child doesn’t do what we asked, and we decide they weren’t listening. A teenager shrugs when we ask about school, and we assume they don’t care. A colleague asks question after question, and we decide they’re difficult. Someone doesn’t return a text, and before long, we’ve created an explanation for that, too.

Most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re doing it. Something happens, we observe it, and almost instantly our brains begin filling in the parts we can’t see. We move from what happened to why it happened so quickly that we often don’t notice we’ve made the leap.

And then we respond—not only to what the other person did, but to what we believe their behavior means.

That distinction matters. If I believe you’re ignoring me, I might become angry. If I believe you’re overwhelmed, I might become concerned or curious. If I think a child isn’t doing something because he doesn’t care, I’m likely to respond very differently than I would if I thought he cared very much but didn’t know how to begin.

The behavior hasn’t changed. The story has.

Human behavior doesn’t come with an explanation attached. We can see that someone interrupted us, but we can’t see why. We know a child didn’t start the assignment, but we don’t automatically know what got in the way. We know someone became quiet in the middle of a conversation, but silence doesn’t tell us whether that person is angry, hurt, overwhelmed, distracted, tired, or simply thinking.

So we fill in the blanks. We have to, to some degree. We are constantly making sense of the people and situations around us. The trouble begins when we forget that we filled in the blank ourselves.

He doesn’t care. She’s being disrespectful. He’s lazy. She’s controlling. They’re ignoring me.

Those conclusions can feel remarkably factual once we’ve made them. And when we become certain about another person’s motivation, our own response can feel completely justified. We are no longer reacting simply to the late arrival, the unfinished homework, the forgotten request, or the unanswered text. We are reacting to the meaning we’ve assigned to it.

What we see and what we know

As a psychologist, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the space between what I can observe and what I can actually conclude. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that space matters far beyond the testing room.

A child sitting in front of an unfinished assignment tells me that the assignment isn’t getting done. It doesn’t tell me why. A teenager spending hours in his room tells me where he is spending his time, but not what that time is doing for him. An adult who repeatedly puts something off tells me there is a pattern, but not necessarily what is driving it. The obstacle could be motivation, anxiety, uncertainty, executive functioning, resentment, exhaustion—or something I haven’t considered yet.

Of course, sometimes the simplest explanation turns out to be the right one. Sometimes a child really doesn’t want to do the homework. Sometimes someone really is inconsiderate. Sometimes people avoid responsibility, make poor choices, or behave badly. Understanding human behavior doesn’t require us to manufacture a kinder explanation every time someone does something we don’t like.

It does, however, require us to recognize the difference between an observation and an interpretation.

That is a distinction I think we lose surprisingly easily.

We do something similar when we describe people. A behavior happens repeatedly, so we turn it into a characteristic: disorganized, lazy, difficult, dramatic, stubborn, controlling, sensitive. Sometimes those words describe a recognizable pattern, but they can also close the door on curiosity. Once I have decided that someone is simply lazy, I don’t have much reason to wonder why he isn’t starting. If I’ve decided a child is dramatic, I’m less likely to wonder why something feels so big to her. If I believe someone is controlling, I may never ask what uncertainty feels like from where she is standing.

The story begins doing the explaining for us.

This becomes particularly important with children because the stories adults tell about them can gradually become stories children tell about themselves. A child who repeatedly hears, “You never listen,” “You’re so disorganized,” “You’re too sensitive,” or “You just aren’t trying” may eventually stop hearing those statements as descriptions of particular moments. They can begin to sound like descriptions of who that child is.

Over time, You’re disorganized can become I’m a disorganized person. You aren’t trying can become I’m lazy. Why do you always make everything so difficult? can become I’m the difficult one.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t name problems. We absolutely should. Children - and adults - both need honest feedback, expectations, limits, and opportunities to take responsibility for their behavior. But there is an important difference between helping someone understand a struggle and defining that person by it. The language we use matters because understanding ourselves is also, in part, a story we construct.

The usefulness of “I wonder”

Perhaps that is why two of the most useful words I’ve learned in more than 17 years as a psychologist are very simple ones:

I wonder.

I wonder why this keeps happening. I wonder why it happens here but not there. I wonder what came before it. I wonder what this person thinks is happening. I wonder whether the explanation that seems obvious to me is actually the right one. I wonder what I’m missing.

“I wonder” doesn’t mean abandoning judgment, accountability, or expectations. It doesn’t mean that every behavior is acceptable or that understanding the reason for something excuses it. And it certainly doesn’t mean we can never reach conclusions. My work requires me to reach conclusions every day.

What curiosity does is create a little space between what happened and what we’ve decided it means.

And sometimes that small amount of space is enough to change an interaction.

There is a humility in understanding other people that I think we don’t talk about enough. We will get it wrong sometimes. We will misunderstand our children. Our partners will misunderstand us. Teachers will misread students, students will misread teachers, friends will misinterpret one another, and people who love each other very much will occasionally walk away from the same conversation with completely different versions of what just happened.

That isn’t necessarily a failure of the relationship. It is part of being human. Each of us enters an interaction with our own history, expectations, sensitivities, assumptions, and ways of interpreting the world. We don’t experience other people objectively. We experience them through all of that.

The goal, then, isn’t to stop forming impressions or questioning every conclusion we make. We couldn’t function that way. Perhaps the goal is simply to hold some of our stories a little more loosely—to notice when we’re treating an assumption as a certainty, to become especially curious when someone’s behavior doesn’t fit what we know about them, and to be willing to ask a question before supplying the answer ourselves.

And when new information arrives, we need to be willing to revise the story.

Understanding can change the story

One idea has stayed with me particularly strongly through my years as a psychologist: when behavior doesn’t make sense, there is often something we don’t yet understand.

Not always. But often enough that I think it is worth getting curious.

Understanding doesn’t require us to approve of everything another person does. It doesn’t eliminate boundaries, consequences, accountability, or expectations. What it can do is help us respond to the problem that is actually happening instead of the one we have constructed in our minds.

I think that matters far beyond psychology. It matters in our families and friendships, our marriages and workplaces, our classrooms and communities. It matters any place where one complicated human being is trying to make sense of another complicated human being.

So perhaps the next time we find ourselves thinking, I know exactly why they’re doing this, we can leave just a little room for another possibility.

I wonder.

We may ultimately arrive at exactly the same conclusion. But we may not. We may discover that there was information we didn’t have, a struggle we couldn’t see, a perspective we hadn’t considered, or simply another way to understand what happened.

And when our understanding changes, something else often changes with it. We see the person differently. We ask a different question. We choose a different response. Sometimes, the other person begins to see themselves differently, too.

That is the power of leaving room for the rest of the story.

Understanding changes everything.