Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

A certain necessary humility must accompany such raw revelations. I should not say—at least not ideally—“You have been ignoring me lately.” I should say, instead, “I feel isolated and lonely and hurt, and cannot help but feel that you have not been as attentive to me over the last few months as I would have liked or that might have been best for us as a couple. But I am unsure if I am just imagining all this because I am upset or if I am genuinely seeing what is going on.” The latter statement gets the point across, but avoids the accusatory stance that so often serves as the first defense against a serious, get-to-the-bottom-of-things conversation. And it is very possible that you are wrong about just what is causing you to feel the way you do. If you are, you need to know it, because there is no point in propagating errors that are causing you and others pain and interfering with your future. Best to find out what is true—best to disperse the fog—and find out if the sharp objects you feared were lurking there are real or fantastical. And there is always the danger that some of them are real. But it is better to see them than to keep them occluded by the fog, because you can at least sometimes avoid the danger that you are willing to see. Events and Memories Events, as they lay themselves out in front of us, do not simply inform us of why they occur, and we do not remember the past in order to objectively record bounded, well-defined events and situations. The latter act ...