Generosity is not a free pass for people to take advantage of us, treat us unfairly, or be purposefully disrespectful and mean. - Brené Brown

cultural example of narrative takeover is the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a life-affirming accountability movement to call attention to the violence being perpetrated against Black people. But rather than listening, learning, and believing the stories of injustice, systemic racism, and pain, groups of white people centered themselves with “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter.” There was never a narrative of “white lives and police lives don’t matter” in this movement. This was an attempt to, once again, decenter Black lives and take over the narrative.

One of the signature mistakes with empathy is that we believe we can take our lenses off and look through the lenses of someone else. We can’t. Our lenses are soldered to who we are. What we can do, however, is honor people’s perspectives as truth even when they’re different from ours. That’s a challenge if you were raised in majority culture — white, straight, male, middle-class, Christian — and you were likely taught that your perspective is the correct perspective and everyone else needs to adjust their lens. Or, more accurately, you weren’t taught anything about perspective taking, and the default — My truth is the truth — is reinforced by every system and situation you encounter.

When we pretend that we can avoid vulnerability we engage in behaviors that are often inconsistent with who we want to be.