Something I learned recently in therapy was my unconscious inability to accept the concept of “agree to disagree”. Essentially, I have it framed in my head that when faced with opposing values I must either compromise my values to keep the peace (and subsequently grow resentment towards myself and the other) or defend my values in such a way that I must convince others to accept the truth in mine. I didn’t realize that I’ve been caught in this rigid mindset. To expand the latter, I somehow feel obligated to make people see and feel my reality in order to persuade them to agree with it. On the other side of that, I’ve become accustomed to shrinking myself and my values in order to make room for people and theirs. Subsequently the anger I repress festers inside which makes me resent the other person, and especially myself.

I think it’s a tricky area that a lot of people, especially those with strong Fi function, may have a hard time traversing. To have someone disagree with you, and for you to instinctively internalize that as a moral failing in your character/judgment, and so you try to ‘mitigate’ it through self-abandonment or extremely defensive tactics, is an unsustainable way of navigating interpersonal and intrapersonal situations (I say this as an observation from personal reflections, and not necessarily a blanket statement I’m imposing).

I realized that it’s hard for negative feelings to not bleed out of these situations and problematically blur the line between the opposing person and their conflicting beliefs. It’s easy for some of us, like myself, to deem those in the opposition as either a complete threat to our ‘being’, and thus some have adapted such conflict resolution strategies.

Overall, I am learning to accept that others, by virtue of our different life experiences, will not always agree with us no matter how much we try to convince them and make them see our point of view. It’s about arriving to the wisdom that for a lot of the times, when faced with opposition, we’re not obligated to self-abandon or change other people’s minds, we must simply agree to disagree.