how people protect themselves at the cost of others

People reduce things when they feel overwhelmed, threatened, or unsure and want something simpler to hold on to. It’s not always malicious, it’s often survival… but it can cause harm when it becomes the only way they’re willing to see. It can happen through cognitive shortcuts, emotional avoidance, social conformity, black and white thinking, projection, or comfort over clarity.

It happens through cognitive shortcuts, where instead of holding the whole story, they reduce it to something small that fits into a mental box, giving someone a quick sense of control.

It happens through emotional avoidance where they say things not to comfort you but to shut down discomfort in themselves. Complexity threatens the peace they desire, so they try to simplify you instead.

It happens through social conformity where instead of questioning what they have learned, they follow scripts and protocols. Cultural expectations, roles, and power dynamics make it easier to flatten people to what they can do for you and not who they really are.

It happens through black and white thinking where there’s no room for contradictions or nuance. So someone who shows pain and love doesn’t make sense to them, they label one trait and ignore the rest.

It happens through projection where they can’t face their own shame, guilt, or detachment, so they view you only through their own lens, beliefs, assumptions, and intentions, forgetting that there are infinite possibilities beyond their own views.

It happens when someone chooses comfort over clarity. Sometimes people don’t want to see clearly because if they did, they would need to change and review their own beliefs, their own systems, which not everyone is ready to do or even know is possible. They reduce everything to protect this comfort.

But we were never really meant to fit into neat categories. We were never meant to just stay in one lane solely for the sake of efficiency, unless it really is something we choose to do with full awareness and autonomy. We forget to leave room for possibility and the fact that evolution and change come from these differences.