Social Blind Spots

The things you can’t see

I’m not sure when it happened – perhaps covering anatomy within biology, but at some point in my youth, we explored the eye’s blind spot.

And it’s an interesting realization – that the mind will “fill in” what one can’t see – in order to make the picture complete.

And lately I’ve been considering the similar effect in the social world.

Are there spots that you can’t “see”?
[ad#inline-body]

Visual fields

Wikipedia does a fine job in explaining the visual blind spot here, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it.

The interesting aspect is that your mind “fills in” the spot you can’t see – from the information you get with the other eye, from what it might have seen before, and what it “believes” is correct.

Social situations

Like the visual blind spots of the eye, most of us also have emotional and/or intellectual blind spots when dealing with others and ourselves.

“Jane, don’t you think Bud drinks a bit too much?”

Which may be met with denial, minimization, excuse, or rationalization – anything but an actual recognition of what might actually be an issue.

We’re happier ignorant, and so we’re not very accepting of anything that suggests we aren’t seeing things as they really are.

The answer may not be obvious

While I’ve seen enough to “see” that these social blind spots exist, I don’t have a good roadmap to use to uncover them. Or worse – having uncovered one, how to bring about positive change.

Helping someone else

And what about the butting in aspect – I can clearly see that Jasmine has a blind spot about eating habits – but what to do?

We have only so much influence over others, and if they’re set on ignoring something, butting in is liable to strain the relationship or even worse, sever it entirely. It’s not that they don’t get the signals, but that those signals conflict with the reality that they’ve built – and get dropped off like thoughts of snow in the summer – it just can’t happen.

Introspection

It comes down to this:

I can’t “fix” you … but I can work on fixing myself, loving you, and believing that my support over time will help you along.

And that’s my fancy way of saying – look for your own blind spots;-)

Assembling clues

And when you start looking at yourself, you might start picking up on clues that others have been leaving for you.

It’s not required to say or do anything other than bring those concepts in – and figure out how they all relate.

Not easy to do – but who ever said life was easy?-)