Why you can’t build a life trying to be unhateable — your buttons are yours
No one wants to hear this, yet I’m saying it anyway: You can’t control whether people like you.
No one wants to hear this, yet I’m saying it anyway: You can’t control whether people like you.
But, you do control whether their dislike hijacks your life.
I’ve quoted Eleanor Roosevelt’s “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” for years. People hate that quote. They say it’s gaslighting, that it lets jerks off the hook.
I get it. I really do.
When you’re on the receiving end of any kind of abuse, it’s hard to disassociate.
Still, even when the critic IS present, even when they’re deliberately pushing your buttons — they’re still your buttons, you installed them. Unconsciously most likely and in response to (early) experiences of others’ messages and behaviors, but you still put them in your brain.
The upside? You can disconnect them.
Taiko was a safe haven until… a friend lost it with me
Taiko drumming has been my refuge for over a decade. The Yamato Taiko School was the first place I felt fully accepted. Unconditionally. I was safe there. Free to be me, quirks, warts, and inconsistent drumming and all.
Until it wasn’t.
Thanks to a friend I’ve known for years. Someone I trusted. She was going through a rough time but never mentioned it to me.
During a class, she explained something about a piece to two others. I offered an addition to what she was saying — a build on her point. She took it as criticism and adopted a dismissive, increasingly hostile tone. When I walked up to her after class to say I wasn’t happy about the way she’d responded, she accused me of putting her down, making her look like a fool and incompetent.
Old me would have bent over backwards to explain myself. Scared out of my wits that being misunderstood would earn me rejection.
Not anymore. I disconnected that button.
Mostly anyway. The signal doesn’t get through as loud anymore.
I refused to explain what I had intended and also refused to be pulled into a tit-for-tat conversation. Made it very clear that she had interpreted my words in the worst possible way, that that was on her — her own doing, then left the situation.
Later, we talked over WhatsApp. She berated me for “not listening” to what she’d said about her experience. “No, I didn’t, I refuse to listen to people who tell me what they can’t know: what my intentions are.”
You no longer get to tell me what I meant. No one does.
Our friendship hasn’t fully recovered. I no longer feel emotionally safe around her because I can’t predict when she’ll trigger again. And she has done so since.1 The emotional and energetic price I pay when she does is enormous. So I pulled back.
It still hurts that our friendship cooled. Yet I’m proud of how I handled it. Because I prioritized my wellbeing and took the consequences.
Whose job is it to keep someone from losing it?
Adlerian psychology talks about “separation of tasks.” Fancy name, but it means someone else’s tasks are not yours.
Breaking it down:
My task: Act with integrity, communicate clearly, set and guard my boundaries
Their task: Form their opinions, manage their feelings about my boundaries, decide how to respond
You get trapped when you try to control what’s their task. When you twist yourselve into knots trying to manage their feelings. You explain, defend, apologize for things you didn’t do. All to avoid their disapproval.
If you want to stay grounded and balanced, it helps to ask: Whose task is this?
There’s a difference between “I/you caused your/my behavior” (FALSE) and “I/you control my/your response to it” (TRUE).
My friend attacked me. I didn’t cause that. Sure, I spoke the words that riled her up. But she riled herself up all by her lonely. Her emotions, her interpretation of my words, her behavior. All her task.2
My task was similar: notice my emotions, examine my interpretation, pick my response. Old me would have reacted. Current me responded.: “I no longer listen to people who tell me what my intentions are.”
How does this connect to the Eleanor Roosevelt “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” quote?
Neuroscience caught up with her.
You, and only you generate your emotions and feelings. You do it unconsciously and consciously. Based on your beliefs, experiences, temperament.
Yes, others may know which buttons to push to trigger emotions in you. But they’re still your buttons. You can choose to respond instead of react.
You can disconnect your buttons, cut their wiring. Though it’ll feel more like slowly withering them down.
It’s hard to stay centered in the face of an onslaught
I know how hard it is not to react to other people’s emotions.
I know the throat constriction, the obsessive replaying, the 3am spiral. Accepting your buttons are yours doesn’t make disconnecting them any easier.
And women struggle more with this than most men because as a woman you have been indoctrinated since birth to manage — be responsible for — everyone’s comfort and emotions. You quickly got the message that our value was only seen when being pleasant, accommodating, undemanding.
Setting a boundary, prioritizing ourselves, now even feels like you’re doing something wrong, that you’re being egoistic.
Well, a healthy dose of egoism is exactly what most women need.
To stop performing, to stop acting in someone else’s play.
I get it. When you’ve spent decades as a people-pleaser, that’s who you’ve become — almost. Almost, because deep down, you know that who you are and who you “do” are not the same. Still, your entire nervous system is wired for the “doing you”. “Being you” activates your threat response. Your body thinks you’re in danger — of rejection, of disapproval, of being unlovable.
As with anything new, if you wait until you’re good at it, heck even if you wait until you’re slightly comfortable with it, you’ll never start.
Comfort, competence, and confidence come after putting in the reps.
So, start. With small steps, tiny acts of rebellion, becoming a little more “difficult”.
Or better, STOP.
The STOP framework can help you to stay unphased in the heat of the moment
Adler’s separation of tasks inspired my framework to help you stay centered and pick your response. That is, if you can already pause long enough not to react.3
It has four elements (like that’s a surprise with a 4-letter acronym).
Spot (observe the situation)
Friend attacks you for something you didn’t intend
Neighbor’s disappointment and disapproval are clear
Family member criticizes your choices
Tune into (what’s yours to do)
Usually: Communicate clearly what I meant/need/want
Set or guard a boundary
Act with integrity (do what aligns with my values)
Open hands (release what’s theirs)
Form their opinion about what I said/did
Manage their own feelings about my boundary
Decide how to respond to me
Pour energy into yours only (commit)
Stop trying to control their task
Focus 100% on your task
The P in STOP is the hardest. It’s where the self-work is.
Because being or becoming a “difficult” (assertive) woman means you need to get at least somewhat okay with being disliked.
Which, by the way, almost never happens.
Yes, you may face an emotional storm, especially from those not yet used to you speaking up for yourself and not catering to their every whim. But even when it does, it’s often short lived anyway. In the rare cases it isn’t, ask yourself whose task that is!
Let me give you two examples to make STOP more concrete. The first I talked about above, the second I talked about in part 1 of this series.
Taiko friend:
Spot: Her increasingly dismissive and hostile behavior.
Tune into: Communicate my actual intention once, set boundary about being told what I mean
Open hands: She’d have to believe me or not, manage her feelings, decide if she can respect my boundary.
Pour energy into yours only: Stated my boundary clearly, then stepped back when she couldn’t respect it
Neighbor’s request about cats:
Spot: His request meaning that I’d pile what he finds a problem onto my other neighbors (which he apparently was ok with). Note that I only realized this after initially agreeing to what he wanted me to do to see if that would have the desired effect.
Tune into: Tell him (on second thought) what I was not okay with doing.
Open hands: He’d have to accept that I’d changed my mind and he wasn’t getting his way.
Pour energy into yours only: Set my boundary and stick with it without apologizing for it. Accept he wouldn’t like it.4
Mistakes you want to avoid making when separating tasks (with STOP or otherwise)
Three mistakes I’ve made countless times before I finally “got” it (and still make sometimes).
1. Confusing empathy with responsibility
You can understand why someone’s upset AND still know it’s not your job to fix it.
Empathy: “I see this is hard for you.” Responsibility: “I’ll take it upon myself to keep you from feeling this.”
2. Explaining endlessly
If someone is determined to misunderstand you, more words won’t help.
I could have written a dissertation on my intentions with my Taiko friend. It would not have mattered the slightest bit. She couldn’t hear it as she was hijacked by the emotions and feelings stemming from her interpretation.
One clear statement, then stop. More words will only muddy the waters.
3. Prioritizing the relationship over your wellbeing
Sometimes the relationship needs to cool for you to survive. And then thrive.
Prioritizing yourself is necessary. You need to put your own oxygen mask on first.
What happened next
My friend did come to see my side of it. And she did understand why I pulled back.
But then came: “Yes, and how you did triggered all my insecurities.”
My first interpretation of her words was that she was again holding me responsible for her feelings. But did she? She may just have made an observation. That’s the interpretation I elected to go with. And I left it there, didn’t apologize for my way of pulling back. Her insecurities are her task.
Protecting and asserting myself is mine.
Yes, it cost me a friendship that may never fully recover.
Some days that feels worth it. Some days it feels mostly sad. Both can be true.
But. I can look myself in the mirror. I didn’t abandon myself. And I didn’t attack her.
Soft front, strong back, is what Brené Brown calls it.
Next time: Knowing your buttons are yours is one thing. Actually disconnecting them? That’s the unsexy, ongoing work nobody warns you about. No shortcuts. No epiphanies. Put in the reps.
Ready to stop having your buttons used against you? To stop avoiding and start showing up as who you are? Get the Women Over 50’s Unmasking Kickstart Guide.
The first time I ended up standing next to her — which I had avoided for months — she blew up again. Over… never mind, doesn’t matter.
If you ever doubt whether you caused someone’s reaction or not, ask yourself: “Would everyone react the way they did?” I sincerely doubt it. And as long as there are people (even imaginary ones) that would not have taken offense, it wasn’t your doing.
If you can’t pause long enough yet not to react, work on that first.
Start by pausing for a count to 2 before (re)acting. When you manage that, pause for 4. Work your way up, count to the proverbial 10, then 20.
Remember: you don’t have to do anything in the moment. You can always circle back to something later! It took me decades to learn that.
If you get good at pausing and that helps you not to react, maybe even walk away silent, then you won’t have anything to apologize for either when you decide to circle back and set a boundary.
While you’re practicing your pausing skill, also practice using the STOP framework. It helps even in hindsight, for example by journaling. And practicing it like that will make applying it in the moment that much quicker and easier.
And he wouldn’t like me anymore either, as it turned out later.