7/6/22

Having a framework that accommodates mind mapping and anti-social empathy regularly protects me from being destabilized by day to day power plays people make.

Knowing that others are able to map me and anticipate how I might respond helps me see the calculated decisions others make trying to sway me into the position they want me in.

Knowing that people will leverage making me feel inferior to their own benefit, even if it’s just to shore up their own confidence, prompts me to examine the way others make me feel more carefully.

Rather than wildly oscillating between internalizing guilt or a sense that I’m bad or inferior and a sense of defensiveness directed at the other person, I’m able to look at those feelings from what is solid in me.

Are these feelings pointing to something in me that really knows I’m falling short and they’re illuminating that?

Or are they trying to put me down because they’re in an insecure position they’d like to get out of?

Knowing that mind mapping and anti-social empathy being universal human traits applies to me too, I know that I won’t always have the most objective and accurate read on myself.

This helps me understand that these situations are worth examining and neutralizes the possibility that I might actually be falling short and have something to take responsibility for.

It also more authentically opens me up to the possibility that I will realize I do feel solid and that the other person is attempting to make me feel less solid.

If both realities didn’t feel like neutral outcomes (that I was in the wrong or I wasn’t), I could not embrace either with my full integrity.

I would be far more vulnerable to the subtle ways people try to undermine my connection with my solid sense of self.

And I would be far more vulnerable to the ways I undermine my own solid sense of self without anyone outside of me needing to be a party to it.