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Wellness Wednesday for November 9, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I don't have much advice to give, but it occurred to me today that it might be worth sharing something that I can say has definitely improved my life: Gracious Attribution.

I learned about it from one of my professors years ago, and its been helpful to my mental well being and the general project of improving my character. I received Gracious Attribution from an explicitly Christian perspective but I think it would be useful to anyone who shares a similar goal in this particular arena.

As a Christian one thing I am called upon to do is forgive my enemies. This is very difficult to do, but Jesus repeats it enough times that it's hard to wiggle out of it. In multiple places he says "judge not lest ye be judged" or "by the measure you measure others, you too will be measured" or "blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy" or "he who is angry with his brother is in danger of judgement" or "forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us", or the whole dang parable about the ungrateful servant. The message is clear: if you do not show mercy and forgiveness to others, then God will not show mercy and forgiveness to you. And vice versa.

To that end my wise professor taught us one day about Gracious Attribution. "Suppose," he said, "you are driving along one day and somebody cuts you off. If you are anything like myself you are likely to be furious. My first instinct is to consider them a self-centered fool with no consideration for anyone but themselves, jumping into traffic however they please. This might be true. However, in the moment, I do not actually have any solid information on why they cut me off. It could be because they're an inconsiderate fool. But it could also be because they are a young and inexperienced driver who is trying to learn and made a beginners mistake. It could be a man whose wife in the backseat has gone into labor and is trying desperately to get to the hospital. It could be an old woman who has difficulty seeing and lacks any family or friends to drive her from place to place. It could be someone who just got off a double shift and hasn't slept in 20 hours. It could be someone who desperately needs to get to a bathroom! All of these are plausible possibilities and I don't have the information needed to rule them out or narrow them down."

"Given that I don't know why they cut me off, and given that I am obligated as a Christian to forgive others, then it is best if I choose the explanation that makes them easiest to forgive."

That's Gracious Attribution in a nutshell. In situations where I feel wronged yet lack the information needed to determine why this person wronged me I should attribute their actions to the explanation that is easiest to forgive. I suppose it is an extension of the Principal of Charity, but applied practically to everyday life.

One important note is that it does need to be a plausible attribution. It would be foolish if someone walked up to me, cursed me out at high volume, and then spat in my face to then choose to believe that they're actually sleepwalking or something. The point isn't to choose to be a fool; rather it is to recognize that for many situations where we get angry and judgmental towards others (especially strangers) we don't actually have enough information to conclude why they did it. In those cases Gracious Attribution would have us choose to act on the belief that makes them easiest to forgive.

Practically this is a useful concept to internalize and attempt to live out. When I get cut off in traffic, naturally I get mad. Left to my own devices I would yell, honk my horn, and fume to no effect. But if in my anger I remember Gracious Attribution it does two things for me. First, it distracts my mind with a puzzle: what possible (and plausible) attributions could I assign to this behavior that I could forgive? This helps calm me down, similar to counting backwards from ten. Second, once I have found a Gracious Attribution it makes it so much easier to let go of my anger and hatred. I can literally forgive and forget, moving on with my life. My day doesn't get spoiled.

I was thinking of this the other day because my wife got quite vocally upset when a coworker parked in a way that encroached on her normal parking spot. What struck me was not that my wife was upset, but that when I tried attributing the bad parking to something more forgivable ("Maybe she was running really late today") my wife insisted that no, her coworker had done it on purpose to keep people from parking next to her. Now maybe my wife was right; however, I knew that she didn't have any real evidence to back that up. It is natural when we are wronged to want to paint the wrongdoer as a villain, and the more villainous the better. The problem is that painting them as a villain does not help us get over our anger, and it can inspire conflict and hatred with people we don't actually need to hate*.

I would recommend attempting Gracious Attribution for a period of time and seeing if it improves your life.

*As a Christian I believe we don't need to hate anyone, but I think even people who (quite reasonably) believe some are worthy of our hatred would probably prefer not to start a blood feud over a parking spot.

Thanks for writing this. The problem that I have with this mindset is that it can lead to lower levels of assertiveness and ultimately lower self-esteem. There are times when someone does something wrong where it is not in our best interest to give them the benefit of the doubt or process their actions charitably. Gracious Attribution taken to its extreme would allow people to walk all over you. I try to find the balance between gracious attribution and those situations where I should be assertive or aggressive. It's a difficult balance.

You make a good point.

I like to frame this in two ways: what's good for me and what's good for the other person.

To use the bad drive examples from OP, consider that it's not good for me to waste my mental energy on getting angry at some random bad driver. It's not worth to have a worse day because of that. But, it's also not good for that driver to not receive feedback of their mistake. So what I strive for is to notice my anger and express it, eg. honk at the driver, then carry on happily.