False Accusations Bring About What You Fear
Bring back giving people the benefit of the doubt
There is drama at work, rumors, false accusations, hurt feelings, and mistakes. It started me thinking about this. When you accuse someone of doing something they didn’t do, it puts that person on the defensive. Do it enough times and they start to walk on eggshells out of fear of being perceived to make a mistake. If you do that enough times eventually they will start making legitimate mistakes in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When someone is on the defensive because of fear of not looking acceptable in someone else’s eyes, they are in fight-or-flight mode. That fear makes them more skittish, basically less bold. They lose their confidence. They fear mistakes. When in a state of negative emotions like fear or anger the brain focuses on survival and you cannot think as clearly as you can when you’re in a positive state of mind.
I’ve written about this phenomenon before, trying to get people to see that focusing on increasing your happiness will help you to think of solutions to problems you couldn’t see before when you were scared. That is the reason communism will never work.
The more you focus on what you could be doing wrong, versus appreciating all you do right, the more you see your own mistakes. What you focus on enlarges. You could focus on positive traits and how you’re growing, but if you’re always focused on the negative traits that is what will get bigger.
In this article, my intention is to remind you that if you are accusing someone else of doing something because you’ve heard rumors, you could be causing the thing you don’t want. The more you falsely accuse people, the more defensive they get, and the more likely they are to make mistakes. Your focus on the negatives brings more of that into your life.
Bring Back the Benefit of the Doubt
People are so used to splitting these days, labeling someone as bad or good and then ignoring any grey area. It’s all black or white to them. They no longer register that someone “good” (who they view as a savior or an ally) could have done something wrong like falsely accuse another, and they don’t see how someone “bad” (they view as a persecutor) could have had legitimate reasons for doing something.
We used to ask people, “What did you mean by that?” or “Why did you do this?” in order to better understand their position before immediately saying, they’re evil and did or said that out of evil intent.
I don’t know when we stopped doing that as a society but we need to bring it back. Sure, people might legitimately be doing something evil. But we should have proof of that before accusing people. Bring facts to back up your statements.
I’m sick of rumors and people mind-reading (a cognitive distortion) the intentions of another and making decisions based on those cognitive distortions rather than facts or simply asking the person if this is the case first.
Of course, they’re basically teaching cognitive distortions in school these days, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.
The whole idea behind the Critical Race Theory is based on the cognitive distortion of mind-reading. They believe (with no proof) that all white people are racist.
We need to start teaching people to ask questions first, before mind-reading and falsely accusing others of their intention (which we do not know yet).
