“I’m grateful for mended fences, today,” I typed in a message to my friend and accountability partner earlier this afternoon.
I’d just finished a pleasant face-to-face conversation with a person I’d spent a year-and-a-half ignoring after imposing a really hard boundary “for the sake of my mental health.”
I thought I would never speak to this person again, and it wasn’t as simple as just hitting the block button and shoving them into the dustiest corners of my brain.
We’re neighbors—which constantly forced me to make the choice between strategically dodging them or being resolved to just not say a word when our paths did cross.
I preferred the former to the latter because blatantly ignoring people doesn’t really align with my values. At the time, though, I was operating under the misguided assumption that this person was intent on ripping me to shreds and trampling on my boundaries every chance they got.
My nervous system took the hint and labeled them as public enemy #1. Every time they came to the door to speak to my husband or children, my muscles would tense, my heart would race, and I couldn’t get to the safety of my room fast enough.
I wouldn’t take one step out the door without peeking outside to ensure I wouldn’t be accosted on the way to the garage. This habit became so ingrained that I’m still having to remind myself not to scan the yard before leaving.
This person is no longer a threat. In fact, they never were in the first place.
Recommitting to mindfulness practices like gratitude journaling and placing myself back into therapy had made everything feel lighter, so when a hard moment with my son spilled over into the yard—putting us in the same space and on the same team—I felt compelled to break my silence.
“I really appreciate you taking an interest in him. I think it’s been good for him lately, and he gets along really well with you.”
“Really?! I thought you didn’t like me being around them.”
“Not at all. You’ve always been good to the kids, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed. I appreciate all the things you’ve done and still do for them.”
“You know I live with so much chronic pain, and sometimes that can make me come off a certain way. I never meant any harm in the things I said.”
Feelings of remorse and compassion began to well up in my heart. I’d made a huge mistake and let my anxiety, depression, and deep-seated insecurity take comments that were, at worst, less than tactful and slightly overreaching and spin them into tales of full-blown emotional terrorism.
Their insistence on discussing politics, despite my polite but firm requests to avoid the subject, hadn’t been rooted in a flagrant disregard for my boundaries. They had interpreted my unwillingness to engage in political conversations as apathy and feared that it would lead to me and my family being stripped of our rights without a fair fight.
Though we don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on that point, I do see the well-meaning intent behind their efforts, and that reframe is what helped me finally make peace and bring myself back into alignment with my values.
This reconciliation made me realize just how much the state of our inner world can help or hinder our ability to be good to others.
True goodness in relationships requires the self-awareness to know how much of our actions are being driven by principle versus personal interpretation.
The Bully Who Wasn’t My Neighbor
To truly understand why I had such a disproportionate reaction to my neighbor’s approaches to conversation, I needed to explore what had been taking place in my inner world around that time.
Research suggests that self-esteem can significantly influence how we respond to input from others. For example, someone accused of prioritizing their career over the needs of their romantic partner might be tempted to compensate for it with a steady stream of gifts, or they might conclude that they just aren’t good at relationships, break things off, and throw themselves even more into their work life—accepting their lonely lot in life.
Often, however, we’re more inclined to reject or discount the things we perceive as threats to our self-esteem rather than sitting with the discomfort—which is the path I chose in response to my neighbor’s habit of making well-intentioned but highly critical comments about my lifestyle choices, parenting, and beliefs.
In my mind, I already knew that I looked awful and was a terrible mother because my inner bully never let me forget those details.
I didn’t need my neighbor’s dogpiling, so I chose resistance.
I shut the conversation down once and for all with no intention of looking back. I wasn’t going to be told I misunderstood the hurt being done to me.
The problem was that I had misunderstood my neighbor because my brain wasn’t being the most reliable interpreter under the strain of toxic self-talk.
It had started going on the defensive when hearing things like, ”We need to see about getting you a better bra,” before fully processing the rest of the statement, “…because I worry about your back.”
It really played fast and loose when it translated, “I can’t believe these kids have never had swim lessons,” into “I can’t believe how bad of a mother you are. You should be ashamed of yourself. You don’t deserve those kids.”
The reality is that my neighbor’s character strengths are their honesty and concern for others. While these traits aren’t always wielded in the most tactful manner, they aren’t rooted in malice either.
The call had been coming from inside my own head. My self-talk had been the toxic bully throwing rocks then pointing the finger at someone else when I reacted to the pain. It was a liar that had lured me away from my values, and I needed to set it straight to find my way back to goodness.
That meant prioritizing my mental health and practicing mindfulness every day to regain a sense of awareness. I connected with my inner child through creative activities and speaking to her the way I speak to my own children.
I now understand that I’m not a bad mother. I’m a woman who has been carrying deep emotional scars with very few healthy coping skills until now. I got overstimulated. When that happened, my nervous system selected responses that were often protective but mismatched to the situations in which I found myself.
My newfound self-compassion is what helped me see my neighbor more clearly—a good-hearted person who struggles with chronic pain and craves belonging.
If I can forgive myself for being human, then I can certainly forgive someone else doing the same.
The Story I Told Myself
Even though I’ve landed on a more compassionate reframing of my neighbor’s behaviors, it is important to note that my brain’s interpretation of certain comments weren’t entirely meritless.
For years, I’d tolerated thoughtless remarks, unsolicited opinions, and being talked at with little room for me to interject my own thoughts and feelings.
It wasn’t much of a stretch for me to conclude that this person had little regard for my inner world, and that I wasn’t safe in their company.
While I wasn’t wrong about the violation of my boundaries, I had erred in my assumptions about the intent behind them.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to me, though.
Hostile attribution bias is the brain’s tendency to assume the worst when people say or do things that fall short of our expectations. It’s a highly specific expression of negativity bias—a mechanism discussed in the Peace series that’s a feature of our nervous system, not a bug.
At the time, it just felt safer to write my neighbor off as an emotional sadist and keep my distance, and I refused to let myself be torturously picked apart to fuel their ego.
I’d spent so much time assuming what my neighbor was capable of inflicting on me, but I never stopped to think about what they were incapable of—empathetic listening.
“You know I live with so much chronic pain, and sometimes that can make me come off a certain way. I never meant any harm in the things I said.”
I knew what it was like to get so lost in emotional pain that I unintentionally caused harm to my husband and children, so it wasn’t that hard to imagine all the ways debilitating musculoskeletal pain might get in the way of being open and curious about other people’s lived experiences.
When I really thought about it in that way, I came to realize that the worst thing my neighbor had done was fail to meet my personal expectations for our conversations.
What Goodness in Relationships Actually Requires
Even if my assumptions about my neighbor’s motives had been proven true, the ironclad boundary I’d set ignored one fundamental characteristic of human nature—our ability to grow and change with every passing year and new experience.
My silent treatment only served to cut off the flow of information about my neighbor’s life and essentially froze them in time. I had no idea about the severity of the health scares they’d faced in the time of our estrangement.
“They really seem to be making more of an effort to be polite in our conversations, and politics rarely come up now.”
I remember my husband saying things along those lines, but I usually acknowledged these statements very superficially—then filed them into the darkest recesses of my mind.
My nervous system was hypervigilant to signs of danger. Processing signs of change in the person I’d already deemed public enemy #1 just wasn’t very high on my brain’s list of priorities. It had other problems to tackle—like the never-ending onslaught of unreasonable demands and criticisms lodged by my inner bully.
I couldn’t get past the stills of my neighbor’s worst moments, and it robbed me of opportunities to extend genuine kindness when they needed it most.
The irony is that not long after the confrontation my neighbor had actually gone out of their way to do something kind for me.
I had broken my leg roller skating and was laid up in my bedroom for weeks. One afternoon my husband tossed a small metal canister onto the bed next to me.
“Our neighbor dropped this off. It’s a homeopathic salve to help with the inflammation.”
At the time, I’d been so terrified of disturbing the splint that had been meticulously wrapped in place by an ER tech that I just stored it in my nightstand drawer.
Maybe if I’d been able to think beyond the pain, loneliness, and depression that accompanied my injury, I might’ve viewed that gift for what it was—an empathetic gesture and a possible sign of growth.
Closing that nightstand drawer hadn’t just put the soothing salve out of view. It had kept my nervous system out-of-date with the changes taking place right in front of me. My neighbor no longer resembled the threat that had been flagged previously, and my inability to fully process that was only putting my actions further out of sync with my values.
A reminder that people—including ourselves—change in ways we don’t always notice right away.
Next Steps for Your Self-Discovery Journey
If you’d like to join me in making goodness a daily practice this month, here are some resources to help you get started.
Subscribe to receive your free Goodness Readiness Toolkit, designed to help you explore this month’s theme at your own pace.
Put It Into Practice
- Notice how you respond to threats toward your sense of self. Which One Are You? — A Self-Esteem Threat Reflection helps you catch your default responses and pause long enough to ask whether your reaction is really about the moment in front of you, or an old story your inner voice already believes.
- Pause and reflect before you make assumptions about the motivations of others. Before You Assume — A Reflection for Reading Others More Clearly walks you through four questions to ask before deciding what someone really meant, so you can catch the story you’re telling yourself before it hardens into fact.
- Check-in on the relationships where distance has quietly become the default and notice what growth you might be missing in others simply because you’ve stopped looking for it. Status Update — A Reflection on Seeing People as They Are Now is a gentle tool for anyone holding onto an old picture of someone who may not be that person anymore.
Practicing Goodness in Relationships
Taking the time to honestly evaluate how much of our actions are being driven by principle versus personal interpretation isn’t the easiest thing to do, but it’s an important step in being genuinely good to the people in our lives.
We live in a world full of people who are just as imperfect as we are. Learning to sit with the initial discomfort of seemingly unpleasant interactions instead of rushing to judgment and reaction can help us remain in alignment with our values, and truly be a force for good in our village.
Have you ever let interpretations overshadow your personal values? How were you able to bring yourself back into alignment?
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. If you’d like to receive an email notification when the next post goes live, you can subscribe using the form below. In the next post, we’ll explore ways to choose goodness in a destabilizing world.
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Keep it kind, respectful, and focused on self-love and growth—let’s make this a safe, uplifting space. 🌿