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Hm...so what would be the ideal way to a react of a friend hurts your feelings and disrespects you? Would it be to remain aloof and uncaring of the relationship?
According to Steve, he's saying that if someone disrespects you, you are disrespecting yourself. But it's such a broad concept how will you be able to correct it? |
For the disrespectful issue
I think it is important to break it down into smaller pieces. You can’t look at an emotional interaction between two people and say one element is “the” issue. Dynamics in our mind and emotions are complex enough. When you add another person you multiply it by about six. (That’s right I said six) But here are a few elements to consider.
1. Someone can disrespect you totally independent of what you do. They are late to meetings as their own habit. They are rude and say unkind things as a matter of their personality. This is their half.
2. We take it personally. We are offended by their behavior and feel hurt. This part is our half. We create it by our interpretations of what their behavior means about us. We react because their behavior doesn’t fit our expectations of how people should treat us or others. Treating our self with this kind of emotional reaction is disrespectful to our self. We are hurting our own emotional body. They didn’t create our emotions.
Our reaction is based in the unseen beliefs of these expectations. With different beliefs and expectations we would have a different emotional reaction. Therefore, our emotions are our half.
3. Not wanting to feel hurt emotionally, we go to defend our self from their hurt. The mechanism to do this is to generate anger which would push them away. This is often how we learned to create boundaries. Anger and frustrations are our creation. Generating anger and treating our emotional body to this experience is not respectful either.
How someone else treats us is one thing. How we create our reaction is a completely separate event. How we react is an indication of how we treat our self.
4. Boundaries are healthy. Anger is a way of forming a boundary. Its roots design is to control another’s behavior through punishment. It’s unconscious and poor logic, but it goes like this; people will treat us better if we punish them with anger when not treating us well.
A boundary can be a good healthy and self respecting thing. When done with anger however it tends to be disrespectful and detrimental to both parties. With conscious awareness we can place boundaries with people who are disrespectful without using anger.
5. How should you react to someone when they are disrespectful??? That depends on whether you can dissolve the taking it personally and the anger reaction. As long as those are in play you choices will be limited.
6. In any case put boundaries there or make adjustments. Someone said earlier, if the person they are meeting is habitually late, leave after ten minutes, or bring a book or invite another friend, or don’t agree to meet them. There are a thousand choices. The change that will make the real difference in your emotions is to drop your expectations of what they should do. That expectation is your half that I assume Steve is writing about. It is your subjective reality of them. It isn’t them.
When you shift the expectation you dissolve the taking it personally and anger reaction. Then you might conclude that their behavior is no big deal. It is no big deal because you no longer create emotional reactions to them. At that point why would you need to go change someone that you aren’t creating emotional reactions about?
7. Create Boundaries. To continually put your self in situations where people disrespect you is disrespecting your self. You can’t always control this. Not reacting may not change another person’s behavior. Sometimes in a job it may not be easy to just quit. If you have to pay rent and feed children you don’t always have the option to stand up to an angry boss or quit. It may take time to create an exit strategy. But in the mean time, you can dissolve the core beliefs and emotional reactions that make up your half of taking it personally.
Placing a boundary with person is a separate element. Your choices in how you do that expand as you clean up your half of the emotional reaction.
In summary. There is how a person treats you. Then there is your reaction. Third, there is the boundary or what you do about it. Each of the three parts has its own subparts of emotions, interpretations, core beliefs and expectations. The way to clean up your half is to do a core belief inventory on it.
Relationships are complex issues. When there is conflict and emotional reactions there isn’t one thing to point to and say, “That is the problem.” It’s some work to break it down and understand who owns what, and what you will do about your half. But at least then you aren’t chasing a symptom.