Think Like an Extraterrestrial to Improve Your Relationships

Lessons I learned as a physician to see the world through another’s eyes.

Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

• We often wrongly project our beliefs, thoughts, and motivations onto others.
• Letting go of oneself helps one understand partners, friends, and family members.
• Understanding others as well as ourselves is helpful in resolving conflicts.

This post is part one of a two-part series.

Imagining the unimaginable

While my husband, Eric Haseltine, and I were writing our just-released adventure novel, The Shadow of Time, we needed to imagine what it would be like to be an extraterrestrial (ET) whose thought processes were literally alien to us.

We each asked ourselves: As an ET who has just arrived on Earth, what do I want, what do I fear, what do I think of humans, and how will I interact with my fellow ETs as we navigate the challenges of dealing with humans?

In answering these questions, we strove to develop personality traits, motivations, and thought processes that were unlike any of ours, or anyone else we knew.

For example, we explored the idea that our ET would not sexually reproduce, would not be social like humans, and would have multiple brains that thought in parallel instead of a single brain that could only focus on one thing at a time.

My husband and I have very different backgrounds: I was born in France and worked as a physician in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States, and, in contrast, Eric is an American neuroscientist. As a result, we approached the challenge of imagining we were aliens in very different ways.

This post is part one of a two-part series on the relationship benefits of imagining you are someone radically different from yourself. Here, I will explain how I approached the problem. In part two, Eric, who also writes for Psychology Today, will give his radically different perspective.

What my experience as a physician taught me

To provide quality health care, physicians must understand their patients and develop rapport.

Whether I treated European and American patients in private practice or African or Asian patients while I was serving in Doctors Without Borders, my approach was always the same: to listen carefully to what my patient said—and sometimes did not say—to get a clear picture of who my patient was. What did they need and want? What did they fear? How did they go about their daily lives eating, sleeping, working, caring for children and older parents? What emotions were they struggling with and, as a result, what health problems were they having?

Over the years, I learned to see the world through the eyes of people who were very different from me by letting go of myself as I listened to my patients tell their stories.

When I say “letting go of myself,” I mean learning to avoid projecting my beliefs, motivations, and thoughts onto others. Social psychologists who study attribution theory—how we ascribe motives to others—assert that most of us make the mistake of viewing others as clones of ourselves.¹

But I learned from hands-on experience over the years to start with the assumption that each patient was not like me, to listen and pay close attention to who each patient told me they actually were.

As often happens with fiction writers, we discovered that our ET character took on a life of its own—saying and doing things we didn’t expect. As this occurred, I paid close attention to who the ET really wanted to be, as distinct from what we originally wanted it to be.

The result was surprising and, to me, quite satisfying.

Applying those lessons to relationships

Whether your relationship is with a partner, family member, friend, or co-worker, letting go of yourself to think like an ET could help you reduce conflict and improve the relationship by avoiding the pitfalls of projecting yourself onto someone else.

For instance, if a partner exhibits a behavior that irritates you, like commenting on your driving, ask yourself, "Am I irritated because I would only engage in that behavior if my motivation were negative (e.g., wanting to control the other person)?"

If the answer is "Yes," try to imagine a less negative motivation (e.g., concern for personal safety). Better still, ask your partner why they are exhibiting the behavior and really listen to the answer.

I try to do this with my husband whenever there is friction between us because, as a French woman, I often find his male, American brain to be utterly alien.

The two of us really are from different planets, and it helps to see ourselves through the eyes of ETs from each of those worlds.

So, if you are struggling in a relationship, strive to listen and try to understand your partner as if that person were from a different planet and vice versa. It will brighten your day and might make both of you laugh, which is always good in a relationship.