We each experience the world in our own precise way. This is informed by our experiences and beliefs, our expectations, choices and behaviour.

We get some say in that, and it is possible to radically change how you experience life, although it isn’t easy, and the more dramatically you want to change your perspective, the more work it takes.

This is especially relevant around spirituality. Two people in the same ritual will not experience that ritual in the same way. Shared experiences can mean radically different things to people. It’s important to have space for that and not to try and dictate how people ‘should’ feel or what their experiences are ‘supposed’ to mean.

It can be disorientating when someone else’s take on an experience is radically different from your own. It can leave you feeling that either you must be wrong, or they must be wrong. Life is often much more plural and complex than that. Much of the time it’s not too hard to manage having a different take on things, but sometimes it can become really problematic.

What do you do when someone else asserts that their version of reality is right, and yours is wrong? This happens a lot around spirituality. When it happens in the context of massive power imbalances, people can be forced to act as though they accept a reality that is not real for them. That’s a really psychologically damaging thing to experience. That kind of controlling can be done deliberately in the context of cults, and other abusive, manipulative situations.

At the same time it is of course possible to be wrong. We can all misunderstand things or not have a context for making sense of what we’re experiencing. Some of us jump at shadows. Sometimes being told that you’ve got it wrong is a helpful thing, if you can hear it. In safe and sane situations, there’s evidence to back up the right take, or explanations that make sense. In healthy situations, a challenge to your perceptions is likely to improve things for you, not distress you.

Being able to relate to a consensus reality is vital for our mental health and practical functionality. Being able to hold our own understandings of things is also vital. Healthy situations will let you have your own take on things to a fair degree, and unhealthy situations will tend to want to control your understanding and keep it in line with someone else’s view.

These are not easy things to judge. Perhaps the most useful question to ask is how able to function effectively you are. Being able to function effectively indicates having a healthy relationship with reality. Problems in functioning, difficulty making decisions and not being able to get the outcomes you expected can suggest that you might not have a good or useful understanding of what’s going on. If someone else is trying to impose a reality on you to control you, then the ways in which that impacts on your functionality can feel like you’re going mad, not like you’re being manipulated. It’s not easy to recognise this when it’s happening.

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