How We Encourage the Behaviour We Feel We Deserve

We tend to assume that people are either very nice to us – or not – according to certain fixed criteria in their natures that we have very little control over. If they treat us well, it’s because their characters are fundamentally decent and generous. If they treat us badly, it’s because they are inherently corrupt.

But what we tend to miss here is a more perturbing insight: that people’s behaviour towards us is to a large extent determined by what we unconsciously communicate that we deserve from others. Their degree of kindness or meanness is subtly calibrated to fit in with what we ourselves are largely unconsciously communicating as to what we can and should take.

People will on the whole try to get away with whatever they can. There is a natural inclination to the lowest forms of behaviour: selfishness, meanness, callousness, laziness, messiness. What then decides the precise intensity with which such behaviours manifest themselves around us is whether or not we stop them – and insist on something better.

The arena in which this fluidity occurs most intensely and often tragically is relationships. Imagine two people who have recently come together. As they get to know one another, both people will be broadcasting microscopic messages as to their expectations – and their relative power to act when these have not been met. Suppose that one person says that tidiness matters to them. But suppose too that when their partner leaves the contents of a take-away meal across their study desk, they say very little or get petulantly angry but no more. Through such a breach, a message reaches their partner: this person doesn’t stand up for themselves, this person says all sorts of things but doesn’t follow through. From such small beginnings, larger consequences may follow. In the most awful relationships, a person may sniff out that their partner will let the most egregious behaviours pass – betrayals, violence, lies etc. – and these will all indeed come to pass.

The tragic element is that people who end up being badly treated are almost always those who have already been badly treated before, usually in childhood. A bad childhood doesn’t just impose a one-off penalty. Unless its legacy is understood, a further price keeps having to be paid, multiple times, until the suffering that our past made us condone is identified and stopped.

There are some of us who, in order to survive the circumstances of our early years, had no option but to put up with terrible behaviour. Our father might have been sarcastic and belittling, our mother entirely self-absorbed and passive aggressive. But we couldn’t – aged five – do anything about this. There were no lawyers to call or other homes to go to. And so we developed a faculty that, though at the time it made perfect sense, has imposed a heavy toll on the rest of our lives: we learnt to put up with appalling treatment, we grew used to our boundaries being violated; we learnt to survive by putting up with being trampled upon.

These are then the expectations we take into our adult relationships. Here, from the earliest days, we leak out a terrible message: you can treat me badly and I won’t know how to protest. You can take more than your share, and I’ll think it’s my fault. You can exploit me and I don’t know how to say no. You can take advantage of me and I’ll think this is normal. I have been habituated to unfeasible degrees of harm and you can have your way with me.

For a long time, we don’t know this about ourselves. We don’t even know that we are in a cruel relationship and have lost any ability to say the loud and necessary ‘stop.’ Feeling miserable is the norm; we tell ourselves that everyone is complicated, that there is no such thing as a perfect relationship: we twist viable truths to our own sad self-neglectful ends.

It is time to ask ourselves two simple questions: 

1. Did our childhoods force us up to put with unreasonable parental figures?

2.And might there now be evidence that – considered with a dispassionate but kindly eye – we are putting up with far more ill treatment than we should in our relationship?

If the answers to both seem to be ‘yes’, we should have the courage of our dark insight. We shouldn’t waste too much time being angry with our partner; we should reserve anger for the original childhood situation that schooled us to tolerate them.

Then we should do something we were never able to do before: take a careful look at our situation, and with politeness and diplomacy, but most of all with firmness, leave.