Most Mistrust Is Just Fear Wearing a Better Coat

The ANANIAS Foundation writes about this subject for an unusual audience: people who have been controlling in their relationships, and who are trying to understand why. That origin makes their treatment of it franker than most. When you trace back the moments you reacted far too strongly, they argue, you very often land on the same thing — a struggle with somebody who was different from you.

Which makes this less of a civics lesson and more of a mirror.

What difference is actually worth

Start with the payoff, because the case for tolerance is usually made as a duty and that is a weak sell.

Mixing with people unlike you is one of the genuine pleasures available in an ordinary life. Their author’s example is a thirty-minute taxi ride in Miami with a driver from Venezuela, at the end of which he had learned more about the country, its politics and its collapsing economy than school ever taught him. Thirty minutes. One conversation he could easily have spent on his phone.

It compounds, too. People notice openness and respond to it, and it tends to arrive back as invitations, friendships, and the sort of opportunities that never appear on a list. In close relationships the same mechanism runs quieter: the person least like you is the one who can see your blind spots, and whose strengths sit exactly where yours run out.

So what gets in the way

Three things, and they nest inside each other.

Where you started. Grow up somewhere everybody is broadly the same — same background, same faith, same politics — and difference reads as risk by default. Grow up somewhere mixed, with adults who encouraged you to wander, and it reads as ordinary. Their author grew up in a rural Midwest with almost no diversity of race, religion or even opinion, and found that college and a bigger city undid most of it. Your past sets the starting position. It does not set the finish.

Not knowing how to behave. A lot of avoidance is not hostility at all. It is the fear of looking stupid. Nobody enjoys feeling incompetent, and rather than risk fumbling an interaction, we quietly construct an unflattering story about the other person that justifies never having it. The story is not really about them. It is cover.

The fear that they cancel you out. Underneath sits a belief that does not survive being said out loud: that if their view has merit, yours must be worth less. It does not work like that. Another person’s experience and conclusions do not compete with yours for shelf space. Their author’s own version of this was worrying that his wife would not like him once she saw how unalike they were. She did. He had to extend her the same courtesy for it to hold.

Which is the line to remember: our mistrust of others is really fear. And acting from wariness produces wariness in return, which then looks like evidence you were right to be wary.

Acceptance is not agreement

This needs saying plainly, because it is where most people baulk.

Accepting somebody’s difference does not mean you have signed up to it. It means you do your thing and they do theirs. You think about it your way, they think about it their way, and nobody is under any obligation to convert anybody.

Their author’s own list is the most useful paragraph in the piece, because it is so unremarkable. A friend who is deeply into fishing, which he considers a complete waste of time — and who backs his work loyally anyway. A neighbour who will not set foot in a church, which matters to him a great deal — and who had him over for Brazilian food last summer. A daughter who does not vote the way he does, which makes for some lively evenings — and whom he loves and respects immensely.

Nobody in that paragraph was persuaded of anything. Everybody stayed.

And it is not a licence

One boundary, stated clearly: acceptance does not extend to accepting harm. You choose who gets access to your life, and setting limits on people who damage you is not a failure of generosity.

The test is narrow and practical. If somebody is not hurting you, then suspending your verdict on them costs you nothing and buys you peace of mind, plus everything that difference has to offer. If they are, that is a different conversation and acceptance is not the tool for it.

How to get better at it

Start with your own fears rather than with other people, because that is where the projection is coming from. Challenge them, specifically, one at a time.

Then change what you are doing in conversations. Stop arriving at a verdict and start behaving like an explorer — genuinely curious about where somebody grew up, what they were taught, what they have seen. Listen for longer than is comfortable before you conclude anything.

And keep the reciprocal in view, because it is the part that motivates. Think how much you like it when somebody accepts you completely. Then work out what your relationship with one particular person might look like if they felt that from you.

It is a gift that gives back. Getting there may mean a trip into your own psyche you would rather not take. Both of the pieces in this library that say so are written by people who took it anyway.

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Prompted by the ANANIAS Foundation, and worth reading in the original. We keep it in the library here: read the source. Their piece is at www.ananiasfoundation.org.