When Pride Gets In The Way

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(This post was updated on August 29, 2024)

Have you ever acted or not acted because your pride got in the way of mending fences?

I don’t think there’s anything more complicated than a human being. We are all wired differently, yet the workings of our brain go through the same channels.

Our brain tells the rest of our body what to do through billions of nerve cells arranged in patterns. These patterns coordinate thought, emotion, behavior, movement and sensation.

And while all the parts of your brain work together, every single part is responsible for a specific function. It controls everything from your heart rate to your mood.

Being Pragmatic:

We can look at this in a pragmatic, professor-teaching-his-students kind of way. But in fact we’re anything but pragmatic beings much of the time. We’re emotional and moody human beings.

We might erupt at someone over something fairly petty. But if you trace the origins back to earlier in the day, the emotion now rooted in anger probably began hours before. You’d simply hit the tipping point when you couldn’t keep your emotions in any longer. And someone totally innocent might have been the recipient of your anger.

Maybe we forgot to pay a bill. Or we received something we really wanted in the mail that morning. Say, a pretty ceramic piece. And before we barely had it out of the box and removed from the wrapping material that protected it, we somehow dropped it.

Our pretty ceramic broke into many pieces, and was ruined right from the get-go. Before you’d had any chance to enjoy it.

Starting The Day On The Wrong Foot:

So then you kind of started off the day on the wrong foot. Maybe you forgot you set the teapot on the stove and went outside to get the mail and forgot about it. Only to hear the smoke alarm go off and find your teapot ruined.

So later that evening, during a discussion with someone, you inexplicably detonate. That person has no idea what’s gone on before. Then your reaction causes them to react.

You kind of feel bad about getting so upset, but maybe you tell yourself they kind of deserved the dressing down. It eases your conscience. But if you’re completely honest and look back over the entirety of your day, that eruption was building from the moment you opened the ceramic and broke it.

Funny how the brain works, isn’t it?

Maybe you have an argument with a loved one. And afterwards you feel bad, but your pride gets in the way and you blame them for whatever started the argument. It’s easier to swallow that way.

And later, when the memory comes back, it became them instead of you at fault. Our labyrinthine thought patterns wound the whole thing into something it wasn’t. But that’s the story you stick to. Because that’s easier to accept than what really happened.

Friendships can get ruined over virtually nothing. Marriages get split up because we can’t admit the truth.

What Influences Mood:

That truth is possibly that we were already having a rough day and that influenced our mood. But we couldn’t come out and admit it and apologize. So the whole thing gets blown totally out of proportion and ultimately ends in disaster.

Sometimes we can swallow our pride and admit that that was the case. Other times we tell ourselves it wasn’t our fault and the relationship was on unsteady ground anyway.

There’s really a more detailed account of the events. The emotion center is the oldest part of the human brain.

Our moods are transient but influence how we think. Those moods are influenced by events, like how much we slept the night before, hormones and even the weather.

The regions of the brain fundamental to mood are actually buried deep in the most primordial parts of the brain. They’re actually thought to have been among the first to develop in the human species.

If we’re upset or sad that can sometimes be to our advantage. It sharpens our eye for detail.

Which brings us to the limbic system, which is the major network in our brains when it comes to mood. It is a network of regions that work together to process and make sense of the world we live in.

“We are rarely proud when we are alone.” – Voltaire

Sometimes the demise of relationships come down to recall. Our emotions cloud how we view events, and obviously we don’t always remember things exactly as they happened.

How We Remember Things:

We remember things as we think they happened.

Which is why you can seat a jury of 12 people and they will often cast their judgment on how their own unique life frames the circumstances. The judge’s instruction to the jury is to be impartial. But do you really think 12 people can sit there and hear about horrible crimes and be completely impartial? Their life experience was brought to the courtroom. There’s no debating that.

You can ask 8 people at the scene of a crime what happened. And all 8 of them may come up with a different story. The car was a van. It was white. No, I’m sure it was blue and it was a truck. Not everyone who viewed what happened will have the same memory of it.

This is because as human beings we aren’t perfect. We are fallible and we make mistakes.

If we’re smart, we live and learn. Because to make a mistake and not learn from it is a missed opportunity.

Or the die is cast with our emotions and that then seals the deal. We become upset with a friend and just can’t let it go. You vow to never to speak to that person again. Your pride can be the linchpin that throws away years of friendship.

Just because we can’t admit that we’re wrong. That maybe that wasn’t the entirety of what happened. Maybe we were already upset over something else and that clouded our judgment.

“Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.” – Thomas Merton

What Is & What We Thought Was:

As we mature, we hope that we can tell the difference between what is and what we thought it was, and do the right thing. Stand up tall and admit when things didn’t exactly happen the way we said they did. We can fix a frayed relationship with an apology and an admission.

Or we can be stubborn and too proud to say the words. And that person can be gone from your life for good. All those fun times you shared become distant memories. Tinged by bitterness.

We can cast that final blow. Or we can take a deep breath and admit that maybe we were simply wrong or being unreasonable.

It might be easier to keep quiet and hold that grudge. But our pride doesn’t keep us company or give us warmth when we’re lonely.

Pride is a cold, stormy, barren mountain. – John Thornton