"If There's Two Ways of Taking What I Said..."

The guy says,

"If there's two ways of taking what I said / did / looked like, and one of them is mean-spirited / critical / hurtful then, I meant the other one."

Goes the old saying which I probably picked up here.

To credit that "other one," of course, she must imagine an alternative possibility, which requires questioning one's perceptions and thus ignoring the seeming validation caused by the emotional surge in response to the perceptions. So, yeah, that happens all the time. Yup.