Cultural blinders

When we are not able to see or hear things due to our own cultural blinders/hinders, misunderstandings occur a lot more easier than one might think (also have a look at "critical incidents" by Lisa Salo-Lee). These situations can often lead to negative feelings such as confusion, humiliation and fear. Common behavior pattern to cope with these kinds of feelings is to react in a defensive manner, where you improve the state of mind by using negative stereotypes and blaming the other as weird, abnormal, uneducated or stupid.

When developing cultural awareness, it is crucial to be capable of sharing, in other words revealing your most embarrassing secrets that you have experienced in social encounters. That is what Lynne Diligent does in her article called "My most embarassing secret as a traveler and expat". Here she talks about how she found out an explanation for her problem, that she had been carrying for twenty years, through a television program The good wife. While Diligent talks about facial/visual recognition, I would like to use this example and broaden the view to touch the fact that we also have difficulties in recognizing verbal and non-verbal signs when communicating with each other. We recognize things that are familiar to us and things that we´ve been grown up around. If we want to build bridges, we have to stop neglecting this fact and become more open to different patterns of conception and behavior.

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