Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

Overstatement usually starts from something real. The person who says you never listen has almost always been not-listened-to, and the exaggeration is what happens when a genuine grievance has gone unacknowledged long enough to become heated. Attacking the inaccuracy is easy and misses everything: the always and the never are wrong, and the feeling underneath them generally is not.

So when someone overstates a complaint about you, resist the correction. Ask what the accurate version would be. And when you catch yourself reaching for absolutes, treat it as a signal that something has been building longer than you admitted.