Self-Knowledge • Emotional Skills
When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them
There’s a familiar expression that captures a deep psychological truth: ‘when people tell you who they are, believe them’.
What does this mean? It means that certain people constantly reveal to us some of their deep-seated inclinations towards unkindness, treachery, vanity and selfishness. They make no bones about their cowardice or greed. They may simply – and in broad daylight – declare their harmful natures, taking no precautions in offering up stories from which a negative moral is blatantly clear.
But for our part, we miss every one of these clues. We remain too hopeful, too naive, too much on the other’s side, and not enough on our own to trust in the omens we are witnessing. And in the process, we destroy our lives.
Imagine someone who never returns any of our generosity. Or someone who tells us they didn’t ‘mean’ to hurt us by flirting with other people but continues to do so regardless. Or someone who intermittently disappears without warning. Or someone who again and again responds with defensiveness to ideas that matter to us. Or someone who greets every warm comment from us with curt, dismissive replies. Or someone who never invites us to meet any of their friends. Or someone who is half-hearted in saying thank you or always says ‘maybe’ when we need a ‘yes’. Or someone who never asks us anything about ourselves.
All of these are extremely clear communications. They are ways for our interlocutors to tell us, in ironclad terms, in effect: I am not to be trusted. I don’t respect you. I have other things that matter more to me than you. Your feelings aren’t a concern to me. I don’t love you. I don’t have a moral code. I’m not accountable, and I will put my comfort far above your needs.
One would think that such alarming truths would immediately enter our consciousness and lead us to walk away and defend our interests. The problem is that some of us are not remotely built to notice the attacks made on us by others. We listen and we look but the deeper import of what we’re witnessing evades us. Yes, of course the other person seems a bit distracted, we concede, but perhaps they are busy or exhausted or taken up temporarily with other thoughts. Yes, it’s true that their behaviour isn’t entirely gentle or considerate, but isn’t it the case that they were pretty kind to us a year ago and once promised to take us out for a treat (even if they later forgot to do so)?
The thing we can’t do is lay appropriate and proportionate emphasis on the darkness. The truth – that we have a dangerous con artist, or worse, on our hands – constantly evades us. And the reason is simple: we were never educated to despair correctly of people who frustrated, neglected, ignored, tantalised or blindfolded us. We weren’t able to squarely acknowledge the harmful nature of those around us, because these people happened to carry the title of parent or caregiver, and no child can afford to give up cleanly on those on whose existence it depends. No child can believe fully in the bad news of their family of birth – which is why the truth gets twisted unbearably: my father is lovely; he’s just a bit tough. My father did care for me; he just got married to someone else. My mother is sweet; she’s just busy. My stepfather is nice; he just looks at me a little strangely at times.
From this enforced ‘generosity’ towards the harmfulness of others, we develop a lifelong bias towards not believing bad news from people in our circle. When we end up in a relationship with someone who – beneath a sweet manner – constantly disrespects us, it may take us five years to wake up to the humiliation. The last thing on our mind is that someone close to us could be a disreputable turncoat, even though the signs may have been piling up, and all our true friends knew it from the start.
Once we wake up and learn to properly believe the negative verdicts we’re being served up, there will – it is true – be far fewer individuals we’d ever consider dating, working with, marrying or continuing to spend time with. That sounds like a pity. But it is an even greater pity, indeed a tragedy, to keep insisting that certain people are decent, about to take us seriously, or are faithful when they are not. We need to finally and fairly give up on those who betray us in order to recover a lost loyalty towards someone we have neglected and disrespected for far too long: our vulnerable, worthy, true, intelligent selves.
