There’s intellectual inquiry and there’s expressing emotional pain, and people are forever mixing them up.

A personal experience can be the fuel that motivates truth-seeking, but it can’t be the beginning and end. “This happened to me, therefore [overgeneralized take about the whole world]” is important to guard from. Our pain is not enough data to be the end-all be-all about a situation, person, or its larger context. 

Likewise emotional pain should not be met with suspicion and calculation. People are incentivized to package emotional content into intellectual language when they sense that care is earned by being “right.” A separation of concerns is only possible once we are liberal with love.