Man’s gregarious instinct leads us to live in groups and to behave in more or less similar ways in fairly similar situations. We also know that human relations are made of friction, and that a relationship free of problems simply does not exist.
Often, when offences are committed and the victim, or supposed victim, feels neglected, disregarded or misunderstood, that person develops a certain feeling of aversion which can range from verbal violence to a form of physical violence.
We are all distinct, and so each person lives through their moments of anger differently. In some people, anger translates into a tense, stressed and nervous manner. Others show their anger through impatience and intransigence. Some hide their anger, while others allow themselves to display it, because they rather like showing their strength, their power.
The way we live through our anger varies a great deal. It grows more complex still in that, depending on the situation and on where each of us has got to in life, we may adopt one behaviour or another in the face of anger.
Anger may involve another person or be purely personal. In cases where the anger involves someone close to us, we let ourselves slip into behaviour that often does nothing to favour a peaceful return to normal. An angry person is not themselves, and so the decisions taken in such situations are generally extreme, disproportionate and unconsidered. When our ego gets mixed up in it, those decisions become "eternal".
The most damaging part of all this is that every one of those decisions is taken without the author, or the presumed author, of the harm ever being informed. In other words, we hold a trial, we accuse and we render a verdict in the absence of the very person concerned, and without even notifying them of it.
We often think, and wrongly so, that people are supposed to know what they have done to wrong us. The truth is that we share neither the same values, nor the same frames of reference, nor the same perceptions. The necessary result is a difference in how we assess situations, as well as in the degree of severity of the harm that may follow from them.
And so an unfortunate incident that would lead you to burn your bridges with someone for good might draw no more than a sigh of indifference from another; a misplaced word that would provoke stinging insults from a friend might perhaps make you smile, were it aimed at you.
This variability of perception tells us always to notify each and every one of our friends of what we hold against them, and even of the decision we are taking in response. In most cases, when you tell yourself that others know what they have done to you, in their own minds there is nothing of the sort, and they have not even noticed the distance you tell yourself you have taken.
In light of all this, before you accuse, kindly give warning. Perhaps do not turn it into a debate meant to make you go back on your decision, if you no longer want that relationship; notify the person all the same. Inform, then condemn!
M. Z.
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