When I was a kid, I was seldom allowed to leave the house, but on those rare occasions, I was always physically punished when we got home. No matter how careful I tried to be, I always accidentally did something wrong or said something wrong, and Mom would spend the car ride home lecturing me about how unacceptable my behavior was and what an embarrassment I was and how no one else ever did things like whatever I did and how she could "just tell" that everyone thought there was something wrong with me and so on and so forth, while I cried and tried to tell her over and over again how sorry I was. The punishment ritual would be administered when we got home, then I would cry by myself in my bedroom while Mom ranted to my dad about how hopelessly stubborn I was and how the punishments never seemed to have any effect on me and how she didn't know what she was going to do with me. Eventually, she did in fact give up on punishing me on the grounds that I was a hopeless case.
A huge problem with the way my mother raised me, aside from the obvious physical abuse, was the implicit assumption that, in any given social interaction, other people have the right to define what constitutes "acceptable behavior", but I do not. My mom never asked me whether other people's behavior was acceptable to me: relationships were assumed to be a one-way street with other people having all the power. It was taken for granted that I was responsible for constantly catering to other people's arbitrary demands and opinions (or face physically painful consequences), but that other people should never face any consequences for anything they did to me. It was taken for granted that other people were somehow smarter than me and qualified to evaluate me, but that I was not qualified to evaluate them.
That was more than twenty years ago now, but I still experience a certain amount of fear in unfamiliar situations, especially social situations involving people I don't know very well. If I see any sign that I've done or said the wrong thing - a dirty look, an awkward pause - the bottom drops out of my stomach. I've spent a good portion of my adult life mincing around other people and, I now realize, having very little self-respect. Unfortunately, if you behave that way with other people, I'm sorry to say many people will take advantage of of you and talk down to you.
My own sister, who was never punished as a child, often talks down to me, and I've spent years putting up with this, because we were both taught from a young age that she's the superior one and I'm the defective one. For a long time, I couldn't speak at family gatherings, because if I did, my sister would say "It doesn't work that way" (delivered in a condescending tone). That was her stock response to literally anything that came out of my mouth. I think vaccines and masks might be an effective way to prevent the spread of germs? It doesn't work that way. I think it's safe to use Google? It doesn't work that way. I think cryptocurrency is sketchy? It doesn't work that way. I feel like time moves faster as an adult than it did when I was a kid? It doesn't work that way. 2+2=4? It doesn't work that way. I am literally not allowed to have any thoughts or opinions around my sister, because it doesn't work that way.
For a long time, I felt bad about myself after any sort of encounter with my sister. I would walk away with a pervasive sense that I'm not capable of understanding how the world actually works, and of course that I deserve to be talked down to by more intelligent people. (By the way, my mother doesn't have any problem with my sister's behavior toward me. My sister's behavior is automatically acceptable just because she's an acceptable person, unlike me.)
Eventually, feeling bad about myself gave way somewhat to feeling angry and resentful, and one day while preparing to go out to eat with my sister, her husband, and our parents, I made up my mind that any time she used the sentence "It doesn't work that way", I would imagine her being punished the way our mother used to punish me for "unacceptable behavior".
That evening was the last time my sister ever used the sentence "It doesn't work that way". She couldn't possibly have known that I was fantasizing about violence against her, but I think she did see me giving her a lingering dirty look, and that alone got her to shut her trap.
The moral of the story is that you should totally judge other people. It's very empowering. Recognizing that other people's behavior is wrong and that they deserve to be punished as much as you do (even if they are unfortunately not going to actually be punished), helps you stop mincing around them, and it lessens your need to have their approval anyway (why would you want the approval of someone like my sister?).
There's a lot of bullcrap advice on the Internet to help victims of abuse become more confident. Mindfulness-type advice where the idea is that noticing the feeling of the ground under your feet will somehow make you feel better, or assertiveness-type advice where the idea is that if you stand up to someone directly they will somehow start respecting you (as if that's not going to backfire), or even people claiming that taking probiotics will somehow help. But none of those things solves the root problem that you were probably taught that other people are always right or that they're somehow smarter than you or better than you and that they have the right to set the terms of the relationship. Consciously noticing other people's faults (without speaking them out loud), will help you approach interactions from an assumption that the other person doesn't necessarily know anything you don't know and isn't necessarily right about a darn thing. And if other people pick up on the fact that you don't view them as a superior, even if that's communicated in subtle ways, they are more likely to respect you.
I suspect this isn't popular advice because it sounds just a little bit mean, but what can I say, it's worked for me. Now, I'm not giving you permission to judge people in situations where their behavior doesn't affect you or anyone else (for example, if they're wearing clothes that you wouldn't personally wear), but you do need to consciously notice when people are doing things that are objectively wrong (like talking down to you). Go ahead and give people a little side-eye for how arrogant they are.
Buy me a coffee!
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