You are almost certainly utterly wrong anytime you say or think something like the following:
"He didn't say he feels X, but as an empath I can tell he feels X"
"He didn't say XYC, but I read between the lines and can tell he meant ABC even though he said XYZ not ABC."
"She didn't say she wants Y, but..."
"She didn't say she feels X, but..."
"He didn't say Z, but..."
"I didn't assertively and explicitly ask for X, but..."
"I didn't tell you I thought Y, but..."
That's all foolish absurdities. It's all either you being toxically unassertive, you enabling toxic unassertiveness in others, or both. And, if you do any of that, it also leads to you believing things that are utterly untrue.
Whatever you read between the lines is almost certainly wrong.
Whatever you mind-read is almost certainly wrong.
Whatever you expect others to mind-read out of your head, they won't. When you get frustrated for them not reading your mind correctly, and blame them for it, you are wrong and foolish. It's not their fault at all that you expected them to do something impossible (i.e. read your mind), let alone that they didn't do it.
The assertive non-toxic person won't assume you mean XYZ when you say ABC. At most, they will simply politely ask with bland curiosity something like, "To ensure I understand correctly, when you say XYZ, do you mean ABC?"
And, more often than not, the answer will still be, "no".
Even when both parties are doing their best to be clear, assertive, and explicit, and even when all other circumstances are at their best for mutual understanding, it is still almost impossible to ever fully understand what another person is feeling or thinking, or what they mean exactly by what they are saying.
If you add things like reading between the lines or reading a tone into text, or otherwise mind-reading or expecting someone to mind-read, then it becomes absurdly impossible that any kind of real communication will take place, rather than the two separated individuals each experiencing their own fictional VR-world of self-created projections. In that case, you are no more dealing with another person than you are when you talk to a brick wall. At that point, you are just using them as the blank canvass on which to imagine and project your fictional story. Whether it's a comedy story, a horror story, a hateful story of a hellish world, or a beautiful story of your life in heaven is all 100% up to you, like when you have a lucid dream at night while sleeping.
I gave you these four sentences of my creation as something you can consider saying to yourself once or more per day every day as a mediation, especially anytime you feel yourself getting frustrated at someone or worse:
They don't think what you think they think.
They don't feel what you feel they feel.
You are not good at mind-reading, and neither are they.
You are not good at reading between the lines, and neither are they.
Here is a list of topics about projection, reading between the lines, toxic unassertiveness, and the enabling of unassertiveness:
We see what we want to see, meaning what we choose to see
"You carry heaven or hell with you wherever you go." | Perception is Projection. What are you projecting?
Perception is almost entirely a matter of projection.
Aggression vs. True Assertiveness | No means no, yes means yes, and everything else generally means nothing.
How Unassertiveness Leads to Aggression and the Illusion of 'Shoulds' and 'Oughts'
To have hate in your heart is to be in hell.
A fun example of reading between the lines, and the ways in which the outer world is a mirror, is this hilarious skit from Key & Peele:
- From a Ted Talk by neuroscientist, Anil Seth.
Anil Seth is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science.
