There is an interesting concept I’ve run into a bit lately – being “dead right”. You are “right” about something, but you ended up “dead” in the process of proving or obtaining your “rightness”.

Let’s take out a scalpel and slice into this concept a little, shall we?

Let’s start by looking at the concept of being right about something. “Being right” is another way of saying that one person has somehow figured out the “truth” about something and is the most correct in their interpretation of an event, a situation or some object. This approach often involves one person claiming exclusive ownership of this “truth”, and can include trumpeting of this advantageous position. Dr. Michael Hewitt-Gleeson has written extensively about the dangers of being infected with the Plato Truth Virus, that concept of absolute truth which ignores the gray areas in life.

Let’s imagine that someone was actually able to figure out the complete and total truth about something, even though in my experience that happens so rarely as to be almost worthy of a Nobel Prize. But, for the sake of this discussion, someone has actually discovered all the nuances of what happened in some particular situation, including the thoughts and emotions of everyone affected by this situation. Now that they have this remarkable knowledge, what do they do with it? If they are caught up in the notion of “being right”, they will start to try to convince others of two main things:

• the importance and exclusivity of the complete truth as discovered by them, and
• their exclusive and exemplary status as owner of that truth.

Sounds totally alien, doesn’t it? You’d never do that, would you?  Of course not. So, we’ll just talk about those other people who argue with you all the time about their ideas and opinions.  🙂 See, that is one of the interesting things that happens – others have mere ideas and opinions, but most of the time we have the splendid truth, the cold hard facts, the glorious reality – all of this in our head. Funny thing how that happens…

And, actually, many people don’t even worry about having all the details before they convince themselves that they totally understand a situation. Their “truth” is based on whatever amount of information they deem necessary to jump to a conclusion. What follows is the same – they start to convince others that they own the truth.

Why do we believe so passionately that what happens inside our heads is the “truth” and what popped into the head of someone else is merely an opinion, and probably an ill-informed opinion at that?

Maybe this happens because we believe our thoughts and identify with them. Rene Descartes has a lot to answer for in this regard, with his notion of “I think therefore I am.” Many people today go around identifying with their thoughts, no matter what those thoughts are. They don’t question these thoughts nor do they examine what constitutes them, where they came from or if they have any real validity. (A good short article on this is here.) Once we identify with something (including our thoughts), it can seem like we are losing a part of ourselves if that something is going to go away or is being potentially discredited.

Another possible reason for being so attached to our thoughts, particularly those which seem to relate to being right, is that most of us have a deep-seated need to be accepted and acknowledged by our tribe. OK, we don’t live in tribes the same way as we once did, so now we could consider the whole world to be our tribe given the power of modern communication channels. Since we usually consider our thoughts to be an intrinsic part of ourselves, we can have a need for those thoughts to be accepted and acknowledged by others, as that also grants us acceptance of ourselves.

If someone questions our thoughts, aka our truth, our self-acceptance and the exogenous acceptance we get from others feels threatened and so do we. What happens when we feel threatened? Our hard-wired protection circuity goes into action, switching most of us into fight or flight mode and we start defending those oh so precious thoughts of ours as if to given them up was to cut off a part of ourselves, like an arm or leg.

Once we get into this protective mode, our systems are stressed and we start to suffer the well-documented effects of stress – heart problems, diminished healing responses, etc.

Another consequence of getting all defensive about our thoughts (I mean our truth, of course), is that we start to create conflict with others. Instead of listening open-mindedly to what others think and being willing to accept that our thoughts are not actually the final and complete truth, we are in a determined fight to the finish. The finish is often a hollow victory, unfortunately. We may “win” the argument, but what have we lost?

In some cases, we will lose the friendship of those around us. Even if they remain friends with us, we may lose their respect, as we can be seen as too argumentative or competitive. Few people want to be constantly engaged in battles of the “truth”, as they are taxing on our system. Instead of having friends who are willing to engage in discussions which will enrich our understanding of the world as we share our respective insights and observations, we can be driving them away with our need to be right. We get to be right, in our heads at least, but the friendship ends up dead.

In the end, what we were wanting, acceptance and acknowledgment, can be what we lose the most of when we constantly argue as if our lives depended on winning and we impose our need to be right on others. The funny thing is that we often see the others who are engaging us in conversation as the cause of our stress as they are not agreeing with us and we end up pushing harder and harder to get them to accept our truth over theirs. If we did not have such a strong need for our truth to be accepted, we would not stress ourselves over it and the convincing of others.

Drain the emotions and the stress goes away

Fortunately, we can take another approach which will not only reduce the inevitable stress we generate for ourselves when we “own the truth”, but help us have a better life all round. This approach involves releasing, using a system like AER, all the strong emotional responses that arise when we are in situations where we feel the need to have our ideas accepted as the truth. By releasing these stored up feelings, we can begin to see our thoughts for what they are, thoughts which are not us. We can also engage in conversations where we don’t have to impose our ideas on others but can listen and integrate new information and perspectives. We can reach a place where we see that knowledge is ever evolving and fluid, not static and contained only in our heads.

Releasing pent-up feelings leaves us feeling lighter and healthier, and we can become much more flexible in how we see the world.

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved