Beautiful and tragically accurate snow analogy.

Also great post. Thanks for taking the time to understand what I am trying to figure out.

I immediately agree with what you are saying on an intellectual level. Maybe even part of me was suspicious this was happening but I was not articulating it properly.

But how do I go from agreeing with what you've said here to actually experiencing shared emotion with my girlfriend (and other people) when she shares this kind of thing with me?

This isn't a switch I can just magically turn on.

You've said:

So the thing to do, I think, is to immediately become more open to the idea that the information you have based on your life experiences isn't all the information there is

That's easy to say, but I'm not trying to be able to tell her "Geez Violet, from my perspective it probably didn't happen but I understand cognitively that you see the world differently and I respect your opinion, and understand that my initial assessment may not actually be automatically correct".

That reads more like a false truce offering between battling politicians than a loving message from a supportive partner.

Remember that she brings these things to me and is emotionally frustrated - even angry - about them.

How do I bridge this gap? I want to connect with her emotionally and offer support, not build myself a logical framework in which I can epistemically defend why our views differ.

I think the gap comes from this difference:

I've been trained my whole life to always give the benefit of the doubt to people, and not trust rumors or gossip. Like if someone at work is being a jerk, maybe they're not a jerk, they're just having a bad day. Or if you hear that Stacy from down the hall went behind Mark's back and stole credit for Project A, who knows if that really happened?

Meanwhile, Violet has constantly been the subject of (usually subtly) aggressive comments and behavior her entire life, and so has come to understand that there is a lot of bad stuff in the world that happens because of inherent ignorance and bigotry, and that benefit of doubt is not always called-for. For example, if she hears that Jeff called Stacy a slut because of her clothes, he probably did: guys do that kind of stuff all the time.

How do we bridge this gap?