Can I understand you without agreeing with you?

A very direct message: “I’d like to see you to talk about this.”

Anissa agrees and meets her by the lake, not far from her friend’s home. They sit down on a bench. At first they talk about this and that. Then her friend begins to explain why she felt excluded.

Anissa looks her in the eyes, nods, asks questions. She tries to keep her body open, not to become defensive. The place where they meet matters to her too: going to see her close to home is a gesture of moving towards her, a sign of openness.

And above all, she arrives with a clear intention: “I had already come prepared to manage this conflict.”

As she listens, though, another sentence appears in her mind, one she will never say aloud: “Oh, come on, not that much.” She does not question what her friend is feeling. She simply knows that she would not have experienced those same events in the same way.

Can both things be true at the same time? That is the question running through this conversation.

What were you bringing with you when you sat down on that bench?

I definitely cared a great deal about being an empathetic person, someone who handles things well. In situations like this, my perfectionism comes out very strongly, and I find it hard to live with guilt when I think I may have wronged someone.

The possibility of being perceived as selfish also makes me very uncomfortable. My self-confidence, for example, can be read very differently from the way I experience it. And one of the things that troubles me most is the idea of being the villain of the story, the person who makes things difficult for others.

Harmony is fundamental to me, so much so that Armonia is also the name of my album. Other people’s well-being matters to me, and very often this leads me to want to manage situations before they have even been fully expressed.

Did that need to manage the conflict well also have something to do with the image you wanted to have of yourself?

Yes. I am completely aware that my perfectionism has a selfish side to it, and therefore a side connected with how I appear.

I want others to see me as empathetic and fair, as someone who does not hurt people.

So yes, my desire to restore harmony quickly also has an undertone of people-pleasing. I do not think there is anything to be ashamed of in that.

You said that, sitting on that bench, you thought: “Oh, come on, not that much.” How can that coexist with trying to acknowledge what your friend was feeling?

For me, the two things can coexist. Reality always has many facets. I believe that what someone feels needs to be acknowledged.

I don’t think it is possible to completely abandon our own perspective.

In this particular case, I simply do not have that same degree of sensitivity. I do not carry a wound connected with feeling excluded from a group, so I would not have experienced that situation in the same way. I can even roll my eyes inwardly. But I can also recognise that, for her, that experience was real.

I have no right to say that my experience matters more than hers, nor to diminish hers or disrespect it.

For me, this is an individual responsibility: trying, as far as possible, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. That does not mean abandoning ourselves, nor does it mean having to agree with everything the other person says.

“Oh, come on, not that much” is a form of arrogance that sometimes surfaces at the back of my mind. I do not consider it useful to the conversation, so I choose not to say it.

What happens when the other person is still hurt and you can neither convince them nor repair things straight away?

Years ago, that would have been a major problem for me. Depending on the situation, I could react in completely opposite ways: almost turn myself into a doormat just to regain the other person’s support, or insist on an arrogant form of self-persuasion, telling myself: “Well, she was wrong.”

In one case I sacrificed myself; in the other, I tried to convince myself that the entire problem was on the other side.

More recently, I have been able simply to accept that we are all different. The fact that a wound cannot be repaired immediately still hurts me, but I no longer feel the same need to close it straight away.

I can stay with it.

That verb, to stay, has become fundamental to me. I am learning to live with discomfort, with the fact that a situation cannot always be resolved in no time at all.

When you try to make everyone get along too quickly, someone ends up paying the price. And in my case, I tend to make sure that person is me.

Today that relationship has become much stronger. What have you learned from what can remain unresolved even in a relationship like this?

That discussion was the first real confrontation between us. There have been others over the years, and they have created a kind of trust that now allows us to be truly honest with each other. We have become, as I like to say, “more than friends.”

But what I also took away from that conflict is that there are things that cannot be resolved. Discomfort often speaks to the most human and intimate part of each of us. At some point, it may be necessary to make peace even with a difference, with a discomfort that remains between two people.

I can leave a discussion without feeling complete. I can leave without feeling validated.

In a dialogue between two people, there is never only that conflict: there is a past, there is a present, there is a way of seeing the world.

Each of us has our own way of being in relationships. I bring my perfectionism, my need to resolve things, and also my need not to feel like the villain of the situation.

The other person brings a different history.

One question remains:

How much of our rush to make peace is really about the relationship, and how much is about the need to feel that we are on the right side again?

The journey continues

What happens when understanding the other person is not enough to reach an agreement, and time, power, responsibility and the very limits of mediation come into play?

Who can afford not to reach an agreement?

Coming soon in L'Agorà, at Work.

To learn about her path and the other contributions published in Emozioni, discover Anissa Boschetti.