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The more I read of The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, the more I can understand my own history. There's so many corollaries I can draw in my life based on the examples given in the book.
Right now I'm reconciling in my mind the current Rule #4 that "Honesty is Different than Diplomacy." I can state that this has been the main source of a lot of my problems in the past couple years with dealing with a very large and social group of friends. As I've mentioned previously, I wasn't horribly social growing up, and having just a couple of friends around was sufficient for my happiness. The explosion of the number of people in my social circles in the past few years is something to which I'm very much unaccustomed.
These passages from that section of the book describes amazingly well one of the paths that having black-and-white thinking takes towards creating negative social outcomes.
( The bold is my own annotation )
I have risked going beyond my comfort zone simply in an attempt to be social, without accepting that I was putting myself in uncomfortable situations which were causing me to act in ways that were seriously backfiring. Not only that, but I eventually found myself surrounded by a couple of people who were telling me that I was acting and saying mean things intentionally, and when I took a moment to reason out the validity of their claims I believed them. That's not to say that I am incapable of being a mean, angry, or spiteful person - everyone's capable of that - but it was a step backwards having to unravel which things I have done intentionally and which things I hadn't but believed that I had.
This section of the book flat out encourages holding your tongue or at worst telling "white lies." The hardest part is the Theory of Mind required in order to understand how and when such interactions are appropriate. That's not so easy for some people who haven't had much practice with it.
Right now I'm reconciling in my mind the current Rule #4 that "Honesty is Different than Diplomacy." I can state that this has been the main source of a lot of my problems in the past couple years with dealing with a very large and social group of friends. As I've mentioned previously, I wasn't horribly social growing up, and having just a couple of friends around was sufficient for my happiness. The explosion of the number of people in my social circles in the past few years is something to which I'm very much unaccustomed.
These passages from that section of the book describes amazingly well one of the paths that having black-and-white thinking takes towards creating negative social outcomes.
( The bold is my own annotation )
I have risked going beyond my comfort zone simply in an attempt to be social, without accepting that I was putting myself in uncomfortable situations which were causing me to act in ways that were seriously backfiring. Not only that, but I eventually found myself surrounded by a couple of people who were telling me that I was acting and saying mean things intentionally, and when I took a moment to reason out the validity of their claims I believed them. That's not to say that I am incapable of being a mean, angry, or spiteful person - everyone's capable of that - but it was a step backwards having to unravel which things I have done intentionally and which things I hadn't but believed that I had.
This section of the book flat out encourages holding your tongue or at worst telling "white lies." The hardest part is the Theory of Mind required in order to understand how and when such interactions are appropriate. That's not so easy for some people who haven't had much practice with it.
