A Reflection Of You

Your lens of the world is distorted

Photo by Aron Jäger on Unsplash

Recently, I was watching a Korean drama and an interesting situation came about that made something apparent to me, and that was that humans' perception of others is shrouded by the lens through which the world is observed. We have talked about this a bit before in terms of expectations in relationships, but this bears repeating as it sheds some light as to why some people do not see the trees but for the forest as it were.

In this drama, the main female character, who is a lawyer, is representing her client who has a broken ankle and wrist. I could be wrong about exactly which bones are broken, but an arm and a leg in a cast regardless. He was suing for medical compensation because the injuries were caused by being pushed out of the rear double doors of a bus.

The woman he is suing, however, puts more context into her actions, and explains to her lawyer that this man had been stalking her for some time, and her reaction was due to fear. The man then tells his sides of things. That yes, he had stalked her in the past because he had feelings for her, but he stopped the moment he was served with a restraining order. The meeting on the bus that day was entirely coincidental, and he would not have been there had he known that she would be. They lived in the same area, so it wasn’t an unreasonable explanation.

This is where things get a bit complicated, and also gets to the point of this post. The female lawyer had feelings for the lawyer of the woman being sued. She had followed him on a number of occasions just to be able to see him, and be around him, to which he was totally oblivious. The female lawyer realized that she was basically doing the same thing that her client had been doing, and knew she didn’t mean anything by it, but at the same time, she didn’t see the harm in it either.

It was through this lens that she viewed her client. She understood his situation through her own, and applied her thoughts on that situation to his actions. He didn’t mean anything by being infatuated with this woman, he hadn’t harmed her, and when he was served with the restraining order he backed off and avoided her. She convinces him to take a reasonable settlement, which the woman he had stalked paid, and left it at that. It was over as far as she was concerned. She watched her client leave struggling with his casts.

All’s well that ends well, right?

No. This man was a real stalker. He had still been following the woman, he simply hadn’t been caught. The time on the bus when he got injured was when he was bolder than he should have been because he was obsessed with this woman, and that is why he was shoved. It was no coincidence that he was there, he planned to be there. Not only that, but because the woman had to come to the lawyer’s offices to settle the case, he had the opportunity to follow her home, which is precisely why he instigated the physical contact on the bus that resulted in her shoving him away.

Our main character reflects on the last meeting between the two in which he said he was moving to a foreign country. When he says goodbye while climbing into a cab, he thanks the lawyer, and is smiling. Seeing this again, through her own lens, that didn’t make sense to her. How could he smile when it was the last time he would ever see the love of his life. That piqued her interest and also set off alarm bells.

True to his intentions, he followed her home and attacked her. The two lawyers band together and rush there to protect her, and the man is sent off to jail in the end.

The lawyer couldn’t see that this man was different than her. She never assumed that he was dangerous, because she didn’t see herself as such, and was doing the same thing that he was to a far lesser degree. She related to his actions, and felt defensive of them whenever someone was overtly critical of his behavior. In her mind, she was the one being criticized. She was so focused on how the situation appeared to her she missed what it was.

This plot narrative is one I see often in the world, and every human alive is subject to it, including psychopaths. You only have your own experience, you only have your own thoughts, you only understand the world insofar as you understand yourself. People often place assumptions on others because most of the time it makes sense. If you share an experience with someone, such as when you were young and in school, all the people around you were also young and in school. You shared classes, you shared meals, you shared playtime, and you shared similar age ranges.

This continues on in later life with people being unaware that others around them lead very different lives, and see the world in a very different way. As we age, our social groups tend to shrink as family and close friends take priority over nights out at the bar. Those that share your social circle likely view the world similarly to how you do.

All of that is fine, and actually, it is good. Operating on these assumptions, you learn those around them and you learn to pick up when something is off, and can ask them if they are in need of help.

However, this thinking does not help protect you from people that would do you harm, nor does it help when you are applying your thinking to someone who is fundamentally different from you. Just as the character in the show assumed that the stalker was just innocently infatuated, just as she was with the lawyer, and missed his terrible intent, so too does this sort of thinking blind you in circumstances where critical thinking and cognitive empathy would serve you better.

Someone that seeks to take advantage of you is going to bank on those assumptions being in place, and will play to them to get you on the hook. Someone that wishes to do you harm will likely do the same thing. Often you hear people speak about a person that did something horrible, and to them, they had no idea. However, when the media digs into their past they come up with a plethora of information that should have set off alarm bells. The people around the person didn’t see them because of the lens that they viewed that individual through.

This lens allows you to make excuses for a person when they are not warranted. It allows you to take apologies for trespasses against you, because you would be sorry, so they must be as well. I assume that the second betrayal is more hurtful than the first, and the eleventh, while hurtful, becomes the norm.

Another place I see this thinking is in relationships between men and women, and it is the reason much of the time that communication breaks down. Without cognitive empathy, you really don’t know how different you are. When speaking to my Significant Other about young men he said to me that young men have a great deal of youthful rage. I suppose that in reflecting on how young men tend to be in their teenage years this isn’t too surprising. The music that they listen to, the behaviors that aren’t out of the ordinary but certainly speak to a raging current beneath the surface, that it is the most likely time to commit a crime, that makes sense.

That didn’t mean that I understood it. It would be easy for me to dismiss it as a silly notion. Young men just inherently have rage? That seems like an excuse on the surface. When I consider it more, it is a time when the male body is acclimating to having testosterone, and testosterone can be a source of aggressiveness. That being the case, and adding to this situation an immature brain, you get a lovely recipe for young man rage, but I didn’t know that about them.

There are a ton of examples that I could list that speak about the application of our own thoughts to someone else. I know I do it. I did it for a good while when it came to writing about psychopaths. I would apply my functioning to others where it may not have made sense. I did this especially when it came to low-functioning psychopaths who the studies tend to be based on. It was quite easy to say, I understand what it is like to want what I want, when I want it, have impulsive things that I want to do, and shirking responsibility, and because I understand those things are things I can choose to override, I apply that thinking to all psychopaths.

The last time I would have considered myself “low-functioning”, is when I was a child. When I was a kid I was a kid, but I also was still me. I had a drive to find interesting things to do, did not care about rules or laws, was punishment immune, and got into trouble constantly. However, I grew up, and had good role models that insisted that no matter how infuriating I could be, were going to make me learn responsibility if it killed them. That decision made a great deal of difference in how I was shaped.

Not everyone has that.

I have never been a low-functioning adult. I don’t know what that is like. The best I can do is pull from my childhood where yes, I knew the rules, no they did not matter to me. They were more a suggestion, a request, and a disruption to my primary function of “find stuff for me”, when I was caught violating them. There was no internalizing these rules in a way that meant something other than, an inconvenient result when discovered in violation of them.

Perhaps that is how a low-functioning psychopath sees things now, even though they are adults, and as far as I am concerned, really should know better. Maybe it is still a nebulous idea to follow laws, but not a practical state of being for them. They never learned it, they have very poor impulse control, and they have difficulty predicting the outcome of what they are doing… supposedly. I still think that it’s more of an ignoring of the consequences. If they truly couldn’t predict them, then they would have no compunction about committing crimes without a plan.

I am sure that I have done it in other places as well when it comes to writing about psychopathy, because our lens is the only one that is available to us. Applying our worldview to others is expedient, so long as it isn’t drastically wrong in the situation. I have had plenty of people send me outrageous things in messages because they apply their lens to me, and assume I think the same way.

On the inverse, I hear those outrageous things and immediately sigh, thinking to myself, “Oh great, another edgelord”. Most of the time they are kids working through their internal angst, but I am assuming that this is the case, because my cognitive empathy has decided it has been so in the past, therefore it must be in the present. On one of these occasions I had this one particular person that used to comment on my answers, this was years back, and would say things that seemed quite edgy, such as:

What if you are lethally stabbed and no one cares to call an ambulance for you ,instead they take photos/filming you because it's fascinating to see you die?

I kind of stalk you on Quora and I would stalk you in real life if I`d know where you live.Yeah,I become pretty obsessed with people I find attractive/interesting/fascinating/I am in love with (only in my imagination)/I hate them. So…I`d like to see a picture of you.

It induced an eye roll, and I deleted the comments. Later on, after I have removed several of them, someone who was in law enforcement contacted me and stated that he has seen some of the things that this person wrote, and specifically the things he wrote about me which was a great deal, and he was actually concerned for my safety. he had conversed with this person and saw many red flag warnings that told him this person was very dangerous. He also sent me this comment that I had never seen before:

I am a sexual sadist,an erotophonophile and a necrophile and I often fantasize about torturing and killing young girls.Stress can make people snap,you know?

I am fucked up:

I applied my thoughts that people like this are edgelords, nothing more, and should be ignored. I misread the guy. It isn’t as though I had given him any opportunity to actually be a problem in my life, but that did not change the fact that he was a problem. I blocked him, and he escalated for a while, but then I stopped getting messages from people about what he was saying.

Reading what a person is like takes skills, and those skills take time to learn. I know not everyone is interested in putting that sort of work in, but to that, I say this. How often do you hear about the victim of a crime being described as someone who lit up the room when they entered, or that they were the most wonderful people, and no one can believe that anyone would do that to them?

The problem is, that person couldn’t believe anyone could do anything terrible to them either. Often these types are the victims of crime where they tried to help someone else. They do not see that person has nefarious intent. Bundy is an excellent example of this. He used “help me” rouses to gain control over his victims. If you consistently apply your view of the world to how others experience it, and the motives of their actions, you are going to find yourself having problems with miscommunication, having people take advantage of you, and possibly be the victim of a crime.

It is wise to learn how other people think. It has value because it protects you. You may not like it, and the person’s way of thinking might be very disturbing to you, but it is valuable all the same. Keep that in mind when you are speaking with others, and it will serve you well.