Both Can Be True: Four Words That Can Transform Your Relationships.
These four words, both can be true, have the power to improve your relationships with other people and possibly also with yourself. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Brené Brown also sees the ability to hold opposing ideas in one’s mind, holding “the tension of duality,” as a powerful skill set. In her podcast interview with President Barak Obama she noted:
“There is a concept of holding the tension of opposites, and that for people who can do that, what emerges, some people in Jungian circles call it the third space, but there is a belief that people who can hold the discomfort of paradox are truly the most transformative leaders among us, and that it is a very rare skill set because it requires a level of comfort with ambiguity.”
Examples are:
A thing can be bad but also good.
You can love something but dislike parts of it.
Two people with different ideas and interpretations can both be right in their own way.
Two opposing things can be true.
Most of us do not like the ambiguity created by this sense of duality. We want right or wrong, black or white, we want clarity and certainty. Certainty makes us feel safe. It is like that sense of security which clear rules, laws, and boundaries provide. As much as we love the idea of freedom, we also crave predictability and surety, we do not do well with the middle place.
Imagine traveling to a completely new country with vastly different cultural and societal norms from those you have been exposed to. Imagine not knowing what those norms are before traveling there. How comfortable would you feel? Knowing makes us feel powerful, in control, and safe; we like to know the answers, know the rules, know our roles and where we stand. Knowing makes us believe we have agency.
However, the world is complex, multifaceted, and uncertain. Human-beings are complex, multifaceted, and not always predictable. Certainty is an illusion we allow ourselves to believe in so we can feel at ease and expend less energy trying to figure things out. We like to fit the world into neat boxes
If we hold on to the belief that there is only one right answer, our relationships will struggle. The closer the relationship, the more it would struggle. My less mature self, used to need certainty. More honestly, my less mature self needed to be right, maybe not all the time, but a lot of the time. If I was in a disagreement with someone, their perspective was wrong because they were just not empathic enough, compassionate enough, caring enough, they didn’t “get it” because they didn’t experience what I experienced, or they were just otherwise flawed as a human being. I’m only half exaggerating, but don’t tell me you have not thought the same thing sometimes.
If what we perceive, feel, and understand to be true was the opposite of what someone else perceives, feels and understands to be true, how would it be possible to reconcile and come back together? I have found that the most powerful but also honest way is to understand that both can be true; both feelings and can be valid and both perspectives can hold a part of the complex truth.
An extrovert is energized by being around people at a large celebratory event, while an introvert can feel depleted in the same environment and need to refuel in quiet. Cooking my family a meal they love, can make me very happy while at the same time, I can hate the stress of cooking. I can feel like I am exhausting myself by giving more emotional resources than I have, to my family because of how important they are to me, while they can feel I am never there for them because I am always stressed and unhappy. I can feel unseen while my partner can feel like all they ever do is think about me.
These opposites can all be true. They can co-exist because we are complex beings living multifaceted lives. What I experience, and my perspective, emerges from my history, my genetics, my socialization, my current stressors, my drives, and from other legitimate things I am currently not thinking of. The same is true of every other individual; we come by our perspectives honestly.
Here is the magic; When we come to accept both can be true, when we validate each other’s experiences and hold both to be legitimate at the same time, we can come a long way toward understanding one another, to giving one another a space within the relationship to exist as our authentic selves, in the full expression of our humanity. When you have that, I believe you have everything you need to build a deeper connection with each other.
I don’t mean everyone is right all the time. I just mean almost everyone’s experience can be understood and in that way is valid. When we approach each other with understanding, instead of trying to prove who is right and who is wrong, or even who is more right and more wrong, we can create that safety we all crave within a relationship. That safety can allow us to live in the ambiguous; It is difficult because it requires non-judgement, non-defensiveness, honesty, vulnerability, and the discomfort of more than one truth, but it also allows more room for each person to exist fully and authentically. And authenticity is a necessary condition for true connection.
I also mentioned the four words, both can be true, can even improve our relationship with ourselves. It was a transformative moment for me when I understood that. Remember I said we are complex beings? Well, part of that means dualities can exist even within us.
Human beings want so much to seem consistent, not just to others but to themselves. It gives us a sense of identity. Who are we? What do we like/not like? What do we value? What do we believe in? What are we against and what are we for? We want to seem consistent in all these areas and more. We want this so much we have two major biases that push us toward “consistency”.
The first is called commitment and consistency bias. This is the tendency to continue to act according to previous commitments we have made because we want to appear to be internally consistent, rational, and stable. What that means is once we make an initial commitment to a position, a group, a person, or an image of ourselves, we stick to it, even when we don’t continue to truly believe in it.
The second is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance theory suggests people experience mental discomfort when a combination of their values, beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, conflict with each other. According to Leon Festinger (1957), human beings strive for internal psychological consistency; People want to seem internally consistent to others as well as to themselves. Becoming aware that their behavior may not match their value, or two of their beliefs may contradict one another, causes psychological discomfort that the individual is then motivated to resolve. People often attempt to relieve the tension caused by cognitive dissonance by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding new contradictory information and blindly believing what they want to believe (confirmation bias). They may alternately try to justify or rationalize their behavior despite their beliefs.
However, both these biases ignore the reality that it is very human, and completely understandable, to hold two opposing ideas, emotions, desires, and drives at the same time.
I can hurt someone and at the same time love them and not want to hurt them. I can care about someone, and yet be unable to care for them in the way they need. We can be good and bad, we can be kind and sometimes unkind. I can love my children and yet love time for myself.
To “seem” consistent, we need to deny a part of our truth, and when we do that, we do not allow ourselves to really feel what we feel, or open ourselves up to who we are, or express ourselves fully and authentically. We turn on ourselves by hiding pieces of us in shame and doubt. Ironically, the armor of certainty and consistency we put on instead, means we will be impenetrable to true connection, or change. As we wrote about in an earlier Vibe Vault: Unlocked Podcast on self-compassion, it is only when we accept our truth from a point of self-compassion can we ever change ourselves to become better.
Point I am trying to make is this: we need to accept the duality within and between us. When we face the fullness and complexity of who we are as people, when we accept that we all can be complicated and inconsistent, different but still valid, and realize both can be true, we won’t need to fight about rightness or wrongness or deny parts of ourselves. We will instead be released to accept ourselves as we are, see mistakes and allow change within us as we learn and grow, appreciate others for their own perspectives, and create a world that feels safer for each of us to live in our truths.
It may be messier, a little less knowable, I may not get to be the one who is always “right”, but it is a world I would prefer to live in.