My cup-stacking motion is something like “reflexively trying to see the another person’s view, and finding a frame from which their words make sense and they are reasonable even when they seem obviously crazy or deluded or malicious”.
For some reason it took me several days since reading this post to realize it as an instance of the thing being discussed, but then I happened to remember all the times where person A would write a thing, person B would go “that’s obviously crazy and mean and not worth listening to”, and I’d almost instantly be like “well yeah their point 1 is kind of exaggerated and I wouldn’t personally use that kind of wording for their point 2 either, but I think it’s basically saying this thing which I think makes sense, and yeah they are expressing themselves in a hurtful way but I think they’re in angry and in pain and lashing out so I don’t think they mean really anything bad by it...”
(And then person B might sometimes look at me incredulously.)
A comprehensive structure for seeing another person’s crazy-seeming argument as reasonable, maybe not quite completely constructed in one cup-stacking position, but enough of it assembled into a felt sense of the overall structure that I can keep pulling on more thread from the felt sense until I have the whole thing presented to person B.
This has generally felt very valuable, but its downside has been that at least twice in my life, my mind has kept doing the same reflexive oh-they-are-being-kinda-unreasonable-but-they-are-really-in-a-lot-of-pain-themselves motion to keep justifying a situation where person A was actually unleashing ongoing and unending emotional abuse on me, and my lack of consistently standing up for myself served as a signal that they could do more of it. Which (among other things) suggests the motion having an origin as a type of fawn response: strive to avoid conflict with others by always reconceptualizing their motives in such a way that I avoid getting angry at them.
My cup-stacking motion is something like “reflexively trying to see the another person’s view, and finding a frame from which their words make sense and they are reasonable even when they seem obviously crazy or deluded or malicious”.
For some reason it took me several days since reading this post to realize it as an instance of the thing being discussed, but then I happened to remember all the times where person A would write a thing, person B would go “that’s obviously crazy and mean and not worth listening to”, and I’d almost instantly be like “well yeah their point 1 is kind of exaggerated and I wouldn’t personally use that kind of wording for their point 2 either, but I think it’s basically saying this thing which I think makes sense, and yeah they are expressing themselves in a hurtful way but I think they’re in angry and in pain and lashing out so I don’t think they mean really anything bad by it...”
(And then person B might sometimes look at me incredulously.)
A comprehensive structure for seeing another person’s crazy-seeming argument as reasonable, maybe not quite completely constructed in one cup-stacking position, but enough of it assembled into a felt sense of the overall structure that I can keep pulling on more thread from the felt sense until I have the whole thing presented to person B.
This has generally felt very valuable, but its downside has been that at least twice in my life, my mind has kept doing the same reflexive oh-they-are-being-kinda-unreasonable-but-they-are-really-in-a-lot-of-pain-themselves motion to keep justifying a situation where person A was actually unleashing ongoing and unending emotional abuse on me, and my lack of consistently standing up for myself served as a signal that they could do more of it. Which (among other things) suggests the motion having an origin as a type of fawn response: strive to avoid conflict with others by always reconceptualizing their motives in such a way that I avoid getting angry at them.