Once, there was a man who lost his keys. He looked for them frantically, and then in desperation cried out, “I just want to know where my keys are!” And a little girl who was standing nearby said, “I saw you drop them in that pile of manure.” And the man looked, and he saw the edge of his unique, shiny keychain sticking out of the manure. Sure enough, he saw that they were there—but he really did not want them to be there, and so he said, “I really want to know where my keys are!” And he continued to look for his keys in many other places. Everywhere he went, in fact, he continued to ask people frantically: “Where could my keys be? I just don’t understand how I could have lost them….” And people felt for this poor man who said he had no idea where his keys could be…
In the more than 20,000 hours of clinical counseling I have done, I have noticed patterns in people. For example, I have noticed that oftentimes, when people are in pain, they ask, “Why would this happen to me?” or “Why would someone do this…?” Or perhaps they say something along the lines of, “I just want to understand how this could have happened…” And even if they are handed the answers in the plainest, simplest terms, or given the answers in the most readily understandable way, they still continue to say to anyone who will listen, “I would give anything to understand…” And in those moments, they are no different than the man who continually searched for his keys after he knew exactly where they were.
When we are hurt, we say that we want to understand why we are hurt; but there is a secret I have uncovered through the years—a secret I will share with you now.
People don’t really want answers to their questions about how or why they were hurt.
And the same is likely true of you. You don’t really want answers to your questions regarding why others have hurt you; you simply want your pain to go away. That is why you keep saying that you don’t understand after you absolutely do; because what you are really saying is, “I am still hurting, and I wish my pain would go away,” or “This pain is deeper and lasting longer than I expected.” Sure, you phrase the questions you ask others in terms of wanting to understand, but to paraphrase Prufrock, that is not what you mean at all. That is not it, at all.
If your keys are in a big pile of manure, it will not be much fun getting them out, but it is foolish to keep pretending that you don’t know where they are simply because you don’t like the answer. And the same is true with emotional hurt, as well.
You play a role in every interaction you have. Your natural inclination as a human being is to minimize the pain you cause others and amplify the pain they cause you. Now, of course, it’s true that you never cause others to hurt you, and you certainly never make people do anything harmful. You never make people do anything, in fact. But you do influence how others interact with you, just as they influence how you interact with them. To say otherwise is disempowering and negates the reality of your presence and impact. The sooner you realize that your actions and inactions affect others, the sooner you can adjust your behavior accordingly.
I will give you two examples. The first is this: When you are rigid and demand that people “should” live according to your desires or perspective (i.e., your cartoon world), then you are likely putting them off, just as others demanding that you “should” think, feel, believe or behave according to what they determine would put you off. If you then ask, “Why can’t others see what I see, or think, feel, believe or behave as I do?” then the answer is that they do not for the very same reason that you have not adopted their perspective or their way of thinking, feeling, believing or behaving. And the more you continually ask “why” in a perplexed way, the more you continue, like the foolish man, to look for your proverbial keys long after you’ve found them.
The second example is this: When you nag others, you are likely shutting them down, just as those who nag you are likely shutting you down. So when you ask, “Why would this person shut down when all I’m trying to do is help?” The answer is that person shuts down to your nagging, just as you shut down to others nagging you. And the psychological answer for why nagging is so off-putting and ineffective is that nagging doesn’t meet others where they are in regard to their readiness or preparedness to change. It is that simple, and continuously asking “why” the other person isn’t listening to you is, again, as foolish as continuing to look for your “keys” well after you’ve found them. You would do well instead to accept that answer and then focus on changing your own actions and how you can deliver your information differently, rather than continuing to focus on the other person’s behaviors.
After devoting my career to explaining (not excusing) human behavior, I have found that the answers to why things happen are often not complex at all; in fact, sometimes they are as simple as the little girl spotting the man’s keys in a pile of manure. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t like the answers or don’t want them to be so, because that does not change their reality. The sooner you learn this, the sooner you will pick up your proverbial keys, clean them off, and move forward.