It is so often the case, in relationships and friendships passing through periods of change or upheaval, that I find myself wanting to say—usually after the moment has passed:
“I’m not your enemy, and you are not mine. The battle you’re fighting won’t end if I am wounded, driven away or disappear altogether. It will simply continue on another front.”
Perhaps this is true of many of the battles we wage. We can become convinced that another person is the source of our distress, when the deeper struggle lies in our own perceptions, assumptions, fears, habits and the stories we tell ourselves. We often respond not to another person as they really are, but to the version of them we have constructed in our own minds. Our perception of another person is inseparable from our perception of ourselves and of the world around us. We rarely see reality directly. We see it through our memories, fears, hopes, assumptions and expectations.
When this becomes habitual, genuine communication begins to break down. Families, friendships, communities and intimate relationships can become populated not by living, changing people, but by fixed characters that exist largely in one another’s imagination.
We stop discovering who a person is becoming and instead begin relating to an avatar of them—an internal version we have gradually created. Without realising it, we clothe that avatar in our own assumptions, interpretations and unresolved fears, until we find ourselves arguing less with the person before us than with the character we have invented.
Imagine putting on a pair of glasses with a faint blue tint. Before long, you forget you’re wearing them. The whole world appears blue, and you begin to believe that’s simply the colour of reality. It may never occur to you that what has changed is not the world but the lens through which you’re seeing it.
I know this because I have had to learn it the hard way in my own life. Again and again, I have discovered that my own mind—my false assumptions, self-doubt, defensive patterns and distorted self-image—has often been a greater obstacle than the person standing in front of me.
This is not an invitation to blame ourselves while excusing others. It is an invitation to ask different questions. Instead of asking only, “What has the other person done to me?”, we might also ask, “What have I assumed? What don’t I yet understand? How have I contributed to this? Which part of this conflict belongs to me?”
Perhaps reconciliation begins not when we finally understand another person, but when we become curious about the possibility that we do not.
What if the person standing before me is not the person I have been arguing with at all? What if I have been fighting an avatar of my own making? What don’t I see? What don’t I know? Where are my blind spots? And how might they be keeping me from the very understanding, peace or relationship I wanted all along?
Perhaps the wrong enemy has never been the other person. Perhaps the real battle begins the moment we become willing to question the certainty with which we see them—and ourselves.
The willingness to question ourselves is not a substitute for discernment, and none of this is to deny that some people deliberately manipulate, deceive or abuse others. There are relationships in which cruelty, coercion or gaslighting are painfully real, and self-examination should never become another way of excusing behaviour that is genuinely harmful.
Self-examination is not the abandonment of judgement; it is one of the ways we arrive at sounder judgement.
Sometimes the clearest conclusion we arrive at, after honest reflection, is not that we have misunderstood another person, but that we have seen them more clearly than we first allowed ourselves to believe.
Honest self-reflection does not always lead us back towards a relationship. Sometimes it gives us the clarity to recognise that a relationship cannot continue as it is. It can help us to see that the person before us is acting with manipulation, dishonesty or cruelty. Self-examination is not the abandonment of judgement; it is one of the ways we arrive at sounder judgement.
Whether it leads to reconciliation or to healthy distance, it still begins with the same willingness to question the certainty with which we see another person—and ourselves.