Every now and then I see the mental blocks some people put up unconsciously, when they've preemptively decided they're going to disagree with new data.
Today someone mentally blocked out every identifying marker in a video I'd shared with them, so they could claim they didn't know who was in the interview.
But there was no *conscious* intent to their actions. Some deeper part blocked them from being able to recognize the interviewee clearly labelled all throughout.
Fascinating and disturbing.
Each of us is a bundle of habituated biochemical reactions that cannot see outside its own processing loop. We respond to new inputs based on past experiences - and every single one of us has a different mess of them.
As such, we often genuinely talk past one another - without meaning to, and without meaning to do each other harm. Some simply cannot grok much of anything that threatens a core belief.
It's honestly astonishing that we manage to communicate as well as we do at all, sometimes.
John Moe on his Depresh Mode podcast coines the phrase, "Depression lies," I've adapted it to, "Anxiety lies," to identify my own processing loop. I always give credence to the worst case scenario, even though it's often not the case.
It's really quite staggering to think of all the things our brains could be doing, if they weren't such pros at making themselves/us miserable instead, eh?
I'm glad you've found an "input" you can use to disrupt your negative processing loop. Long may it serve - and thank you for sharing.