Dear sunnycoons:

You wrote: “the assigning of wrong motives and pointing the finger of blame is more often my behavior than his.”

This is one problem: assigning untrue motives to another. We all do that, some more often and more persistently than others. It is called “mind reading”- we can’t really read minds but we think we can. We think we know what the person meant by a gesture or a sentence. All the information that enters our five senses goes through processing in our brain before we understand the meaning of what we saw, heard, etc. There are existing neural connections in our brain that make us inclined to interpret data received by the five senses this way or that way.

Some of our processing of information leads to a realistic assessment of what happened and some leads to the wrong conclusions. In other words, some of our “mind reading” is correct and some is not correct. Definitely nobody gets it right all the time and some people get it wrong most of the time.

The solution to this problem is to ASK. When you think a person meant this or that, ask: what did you mean by this or that? So before you jump to conclusions and imagine that you mind read the person accurately, you ask.

Sure sometimes the person will not answer honestly but this can be determined by more questions, in the context of a calm conversation.

And this is what you did, you asked the other mother if she remembered your name and she said she did not and was embarrassed about it. But you were already on a roll because of the anger at her that you held in for so long. If you asked her why she was calling you Mom the first time or second time she called you that, and you found out then that she didn’t remember your name and was ashamed that she didn’t remember, then you wouldn’t have held on to the wrong information for so long, assigning a meaning to her calling you Mom that she didn’t intend. You could have asked her why does she think that she didn’t remember your name and maybe she would have said that she has poor memory or your name is unusual and difficult to remember or any such thing.

So this is the point: ask ASAP as you interpret something that angers you. Don’t wait. Verify the intent, accurately understand what happened before you believe your mind-reading and jump to conclusions.

If what you find out is a problem for you, then comes being assertive and taking care of the problem. But first verify.

Your thoughts?

anita