Why do we love being right? When we get something right, we feel good about ourselves. Our self-worth spikes. We feel smart, self-congratulatory, and, perhaps, better than others.
The desire to be right can become a curious kind of addiction. It gets reinforced in our schools. We get praised for having the right answer and high grades. We cringe at the prospect of getting something wrong. I remember a teacher calling upon me in class to answer a question. When I flubbed it, I was horrified by snickers from classmates; I was frozen by shame. I got the message that's pervasive in our society: it sucks to be wrong.
Shame—that horrifying sense of being flawed or defective and therefore unworthy of love and respect—can condition our lives and relationships. We become primed to win arguments and be right in our relationships. Words such as “I was wrong," "I’m sorry," and "I apologize” become a foreign language.
In Buddhist psychology, clinging is considered to be the source of suffering. Applied to our relationships, clinging to being right creates distance and pain in our love lives and friendships. Therapists often tell couples: "Do you want to be right or happy?” If we can loosen our attachment to being right, we can become more attached to our partner in healthy ways. Dropping our arrogance makes us more approachable. We create a safer climate for intimacy to flourish as we become less invested in being right and more invested in creating connection.
Relationships suffer when our ego and sense of self are fragilely invested in having to be right about so many things. It’s a great relief to loosen this shame-driven attachment to perfection and simply be a human being who is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
Embracing the humility of not knowing is liberating. The Korean Zen master, Seung Sahn, encouraged people to practice what he calls “Don’t know mind.” He told his students to not know and just pay attention. Consider how it would feel to relate to people with a humble openness and presence without being attached to any judgments or fixed opinions about people or things.
It doesn’t have to be a big deal to be wrong or unsure about stuff. Coming from a stance of “I don’t know” or “Hmm, I’m not sure” can help us relax internally. We don’t have to scramble to look good or appear smart. Our self-worth need not be dependent on getting it right all the time.
There’s a hidden fragility beneath the desire to be right. An important part of inner strength is being resilient enough to not worry about how we’re viewed by others. We have no control over that. We only have control over honoring and respecting ourselves, which includes our capacity to rest confidently in not knowing.
Today’s toxic politics is highly infected with a desire to be right. What if we admired politicians who were courageous enough to not pretend to be certain about complex topics that have no simple solutions? What if people in opposing parties prioritized listening and respecting differences over dispensing half-baked viewpoints or strong-willed diatribes?
As suggested in my book, Dancing with Fire:
Clinging to being right can become a delicious addiction because it activates the pleasure centers of the brain. But it also isolates us and offers only a fleeting flash of satisfaction. Intimacy requires mutual respect, admiration, and humility, and the ability to monitor and relinquish our critical judgments.
If we have a low tolerance for uncertainty, we will neatly order our world by putting people in fixed categories. People are good or bad, they’re either with us or against us... Clinging to these self-comforting beliefs creates intolerance, which on a larger scale ultimately undermines democracy.
How might our relationships deepen—becoming more emotionally safe and connected—if our center of gravity migrated from our heads to our hearts?
Noticing and releasing our addiction to being right can help reboot our lives, our relationships, and even our politics. There is nothing shameful about not knowing something or recognizing that we were mistaken.
So please remember this: you have a perfect right to be wrong. We can make a correction that moves our lives and relationships forward by tapping into the inner strength to not know, to develop a capacity to apologize, practice kindness, and reconsider viewpoints that are inconsistent with a deeper truth.
References
© John Amodeo
Your Perfect Right to Be Wrong
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04.12.2023
Why do we love being right? When we get something right, we feel good about ourselves. Our self-worth spikes. We feel smart, self-congratulatory, and, perhaps, better than others.
The desire to be right can become a curious kind of addiction. It gets reinforced in our schools. We get praised for having the right answer and high grades. We cringe at the prospect of getting something wrong. I remember a teacher calling upon me in class to answer a question. When I flubbed it, I was horrified by snickers from classmates; I was frozen by shame. I got the message that's pervasive in our society: it sucks to be wrong.
Shame—that horrifying sense of being flawed or defective and therefore unworthy of love and respect—can condition our lives and relationships. We become primed to win arguments and be right in our relationships. Words such as “I was wrong," "I’m sorry," and "I apologize” become a foreign language.
In Buddhist psychology, clinging is considered to be the source of suffering. Applied to our relationships, clinging to being right creates distance and pain in our love........
© Psychology Today
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