How to Understand Someone You Disagree With

Based on a true story.

Feb 21, 2024

The dialogue that led to this post began after an article I wrote about affair disclosures appeared inThe Washington Post. Shortly after it came out, a writer who blogs about cheating wrote this eviscerating response.

For me, her post seemed a distortion of my words, thesis, and of me, as a person. Being a writer means that people sometimes write strongly worded responses to you, but this one was especially hard to shake off. The writer and I shared a professional mission of helping people devastated by infidelity. I didn’t understand—how could she see me as such a bad actor?

I’d already been consumed with understanding misunderstanding between people who disagree and how strong beliefs and emotions can cause divisions. I thought there might be a way to clear things up, to get to a place where we could be allies, not adversaries.

It’s not a crazy thought. Consider the fascinating book, You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong) involving a series of conversations between a steadfast liberal (Phil Neisser) and a staunch conservative (Jacob Hess). The two men delve into many of the issues political rivals clash over: big government, pornography, education, sex before marriage, gender roles, and many more.

At the end of their conversations, the men still disagreed “intensely in much the same ways we had at the start.” Yet both felt the conversation was valuable because it had moved them away from being absorbed by simple either/or distinctions and “toward more nuanced differences that offered possibilities for compromise, or at least for mutual understanding.”

Why understanding people we disagree with is so hard.

What Neisser and Hess did is not easy to do. For one thing, engaging in dialogue with people who oppose us requires overcoming the human tendency to dismiss views we don’t agree with or people who see things differently. People’s minds wander more while they are absorbing content they disagree with compared to content they agree with and countless studies reveal that we are more likely to seek out and remember evidence that confirms our beliefs, to be less receptive to opposing views, and to derogate people who oppose us.

It’s natural—fundamentally human, really—to ignore or actively dismiss people and ideas we disagree with. This should trouble us all.

How can we collaborate in taking care of that world and its inhabitants if we can’t talk with one another? How can we know whether uncomfortable views others hold are ones we could benefit from if we aren’t able to consider them? How can we expect to be treated with respect and dignity by others if we can’t offer them the same courtesy? And while no one likes to be attacked, don’t we all want to be forgiven in instances when our emotions or strong beliefs have gotten the better of us?

Reaching out to a blogger who had put me through her “bullshit detector” seemed, on the one hand, a masochistic thing to do. On the other hand, it seemed exactly the right thing.

Starting conversations with people you disagree with.

As Neisser and Hess write, “Rather than pigeon-holing individuals in a particular way, dialogue participants proceed based on an implicit belief that those who disagree with them on an issue are reasonable and complex human beings, not unlike themselves.”

Talking with people you disagree with begins by seeing them as people who are worthy of understanding. This isn’t easy to do when you feel hurt by them or confused by their beliefs or actions. But remembering that all people are multifaceted, and that anyone taken out of context can be misunderstood helps motivate benefit of the doubt.

It’s also helpful to remember that people who are hurting can say and do awful things. As Amanda Ripley writes about in her book, High Conflict, and as scores of research studies reveal, attempts to see people with compassion can help people exit intractable conflict and build bridges of connection.

Still, it isn’t easy.

Reaching out to the blogger felt scary. But I knew that the worst she could do was write another eviscerating blog about me. I could survive that, even if it did cost me a few nights of sleep. And I reminded myself that understanding our misunderstanding held all sorts of good possibilities.

I reached out to ask if she’d be willing to let me try to understand her better and she responded quickly and positively. She even noted that it was quite gracious given her snarkiness towards me.

It felt like a promising start.

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Complications in trying to understand someone you disagree with.

The blogger and I spoke once over Zoom. I felt like there was more conversation to be had, more misunderstanding to clear up, so, I asked to move our dialogue to email where I could manage my reactions better. She agreed willingly.

Though our conversations were (by my own design) mostly me eliciting responses from her, she would blog after our exchanges. In our conversation and in her writing, she repeatedly asserted her belief that I was duped by patients who had affairs, and that my role as a couples’ therapist for affairs meant I was part and parcel of a “reconciliation industrial complex” that actively took advantage of victims of cheating. She disliked words I used to describe affairs and the people who had them and argues against the value of saving relationships after affairs.

It was hard to hear, but I began to understand her better, to see her more compassionately. Her background history of cheating went way back to her grandmother cheating on her grandfather, then her own ex cheating on her. Now she was in an online forum proliferated with horror stories of cheating done by people who seemed the very worst of humanity. Though I don’t agree, I began to understand how she had come to the conclusion that all cheaters were, as she calls them, “fuckwits,” and that only “chumps” (as she calls them) believe “fuckwits” are truly remorseful.

I also developed a hypothesis that our differing views came boiled down to divergent missions. Her professional mission was to protect people harmed by affairs while mine was to help people change after an affair. Her emphasis on protection caused her to double down on believing that people who have cheated aren’t likely to change. Mine required me to remain optimistic for the possibility of change and the inherent goodness of people.

As Neisser and Hess write, “being stretched, challenged, and frustrated can, in the context of a dialogue, lead a person to gain a new appreciation of the value his or her political opponents offer toward the project of living together well in a good society.” This was true for me… even though our dialogue didn’t end with agreement or any kind of pretty bow.

Core ingredients for a healthy disagreeable discourse

As I continued to ask the blogger questions, she did a very human thing: she reciprocated. She started asking me questions, too.

This should have been a lovely gesture of mutual curiosity. But I could feel my anxiety spiking every time she posed a question. She had written about me so harshly and her questions were worded in ways that made me question her motivation and what she might do with my responses.

The ingredients that would have helped me to engage openly in our dialogue weren’t in place. In his terrific book, Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your LIfe and Change the World, Scott Shigeoka outlines these ingredients:

Make understanding the primary aim. As Shigeoka writes, “While deep curiosity says I want to understand you, predatory curiosity says I want to change you.” People who feel the pressure of others wanting to change them or that they are playing a kind of “gotcha” game will pull back or get defensive.
Make the conversation psychologically safe. Psychologists define psychological safety as a felt sense that you won’t be penalized or demeaned for sharing your thoughts, questions, comments, or even making a mistake. To create conversation where people can open up to , they need to know their words will be respected, that people will try to grasp their intended meaning, and that benefit of the doubt about their humanness is in place.

The blogger grew frustrated with my caginess in responding. I tried to explain my unease, but the explanation seemed to make things worse, not better. We paused the conversation, both feeling like things had fallen apart despite our efforts.

Still, I consider what we accomplished a success. I have grown to see the blogger as a warrior trying to protect those whose lives have been shattered by partners who cheated. I have learned what particularly irks her about language I use in writing about infidelity, helping me to be more reflective about word choice in the future. Based on her advice, I have changed some questions I ask during intake sessions with partners. And though I still believe that people can overcome affairs, I’ve learned I need to make it abundantly clear in my writing and in therapy that I don’t think they necessarily should.

Final tips on understanding those who oppose you

The blogger had an impact on me and I’d like to think our conversation impacted her, too, maybe causing her to see me and people like me differently than she did before we dialogued. Then again, we can’t control what other people do or think, so I try not to put too much stock in that hope.

What I do want to emphasize is the take-home value of speaking to people we disagree with. It isn’t comfortable and it may not end well. Yet it’s through conversations with people who see things differently that we can expand what we know, bridge divides, and enable ourselves to participate in collaborative efforts to make a better world.

Here are some things to consider in trying to understand someone you disagree with:

People you disagree with are people, just like you—nuanced, complicated, and wanting good things for themselves and people they care about.
Engage people in dialogue not to agree or to challenge, but to understand them better. Use your newfound understanding of others as a learning process for yourself.
Prioritize deep curiosity and psychological safety.
Move the conversation to written form if in-person feels too overwhelming.
Pause the conversation if it no longer feels respectful or productive. Consider returning to it at a future time.
Finally, remember that you don’t need to agree with others to understand better how you landed in opposite camps. In fact, disagreeing while attempting to understand can help you more effectively progress towards goals that everyone cares about.

Elsewhere on the Internet…

Some random relationship content that I enjoyed this week:

As I mentioned last week, I had watched Nyad, a biopic about marathon swimmer Diana Nyad. Afterwards, I read this article in The Atlantic about Jodi Foster, who stars as Nyad’s best friend in the movie. Foster is a beautifully enigmatic, complex, and inspiring actor “who wants to be connected to other people, and who cares about truthfully communicating the human experience,” and who is “obsessed with being understood.” How relatable is that?
I cannot wait for Charles Duhigg’s new book, Supercommunicators to arrive, but in the meantime I contented myself with this terrific piece he penned for The Wall Street Journal. Duhigg is a master storyteller who breaks down complex, science-backed ideas into actionable practices.

I spend much of my professional time thinking about how science and clinical practice can foster relational thriving, including relationships between parents, children, and even between our life roles. A newsletter isn’t therapy, but it can be therapeutic. Share your questions about how social science and clinical practice can help you navigate specific relationship challenges more skillfully via comment or email!