There are people who have already decided not to like you. And perhaps one of the things stealing your peace the most is still believing that if you can explain who you are better, act in the right way, or demonstrate good intentions clearly enough, that person will finally change their mind. Perhaps you know this feeling.
Someone in your family interprets everything you do in the worst possible way. Someone at work always seems to find an ulterior motive in your actions. Someone in your social circle has built an image of you that simply doesn’t match who you believe you are.
So you try to correct this image, explain what you meant, be careful with what you say, show that you didn't have a certain intention, and for a while, you believe the problem is just a misunderstanding that will be resolved as soon as this person gets to know you better. But months pass, and something curious happens. You change your behavior, but the judgment remains.
If you speak, you're being inconvenient. If you stay silent, you're being arrogant. If you set a boundary, you're being selfish.
If you help, you’re just trying to show off. If you achieve something, you’re trying to act superior. Perhaps there is a possibility you haven’t considered yet.
This person isn’t observing you to discover who you are. They are observing you, looking for proof of who they’ve already decided you are—the way they want to see you. I know this is an uncomfortable idea, because we were taught to believe that our good intentions would be recognized , provided they were sincere enough.
There is almost a fantasy of justice in relationships. If I act correctly, eventually people will realize that I am a good person. But human relationships don’t work that way.
We are not neutral observers of one another. When someone looks at you, they don't just see what you are doing at that moment. They also see you through their own history, their previous experiences, their fears, frustrations, expectations, and the conflicts they carry within themselves.
And you do exactly the same thing when you look at others. That is why two people can live with the same individual and build completely different images of them. Jung offers us a particularly interesting idea to understand this phenomenon.
When speaking about what he called the shadow, he realized that there are aspects of our own personality. We have difficulty recognizing, accepting, or integrating them into the image we build of ourselves. And that which we cannot see in ourselves can gain extraordinary intensity when it appears —or when we believe it appears—in others.
And it is important to be careful with this idea because it is often trivialized. That doesn't mean that every person who criticizes you is projecting something. Much less that everyone who doesn't like you is envious.
Sometimes someone doesn't like you because you actually did something that hurt that person. Sometimes there is incompatibility, sometimes values are different, and sometimes you are wrong. The point is that there are also situations where the intensity of the judgment relates to something much larger than what you actually did.
Imagine, for example, someone who has spent their whole life believing that setting boundaries is selfishness. When they meet a person capable of saying no without apologizing for 20 minutes, they might not just see a boundary. They might see arrogance, coldness, or a lack of consideration.
A person who learned they need to sacrifice themselves for their family might look at someone who chose to live differently and interpret that freedom as irresponsibility or selfishness. This doesn't mean that one is right and the other is wrong. It means that we interpret behaviors and the world based on the references we carry with us.
The problem begins when you notice the other person's interpretation and start changing your life to try to correct something that may have never existed in you. You start explaining more than you would like to. You start reviewing conversations, looking for the exact moment when you might have been misunderstood.
You try to prove that you are not selfish, that you are not arrogant, that you are not ungrateful, that you are not what they said you were. The more important it is for you to be recognized as a good person, the more vulnerable this mechanism becomes. Because all it takes is for someone to threaten that image for an almost urgent need for defense to arise.
At some point, you are no longer trying to resolve a conflict. You are trying to control the version of you that exists inside another person's head. Over 2000 years ago, Epictetus built much of his philosophy around a distinction that seems simple until we have to live it.
He said something more or less like this: "Some things depend on us, and others do not. " Your behavior is largely in the first group. The interpretation that the other person makes of your behavior will never be completely there.
You can choose to tell the truth, but you cannot force someone to believe it. You can act with respect, but you cannot control whether someone will interpret that as coldness or aggression. You can explain an intention, but you cannot enter the other person's history and reorganize all the experiences through which they interpret you.
There is a limit to what an explanation can do. And perhaps you are spending a huge amount of energy trying to cross exactly that limit. You believe you need to find the right words, the right behavior, the definitive proof that their interpretation is wrong.
But some people won't be waiting for new information to rethink what they believe. They are looking for new information to confirm what they already believed. It is what contemporary psychology usually calls confirmation bias.
When we form a belief, we tend to notice, remember, and value more easily what seems to confirm it. If someone decided you are selfish, they may interpret 10 generous acts as an obligation and remember precisely the only moment you said no. If this person decided you are arrogant , they might ignore countless situations where you were welcoming and remember exactly the day you didn't greet someone because you were distracted.
Not because there is necessarily a conspiracy against you, but because the human mind doesn't observe reality as impartially as we like to imagine. But there is an even more dangerous part to this story and perhaps it isn't in what that person thinks about you. Perhaps it is in the amount of power their opinion begins to exert over the person you are becoming.
Because after some time trying to correct a negative image, you may start to observe yourself through the eyes of those who judge you. Before speaking, you think about how it might be interpreted. Before setting a boundary, you now wonder if this will confirm whether you are selfish or not.
You downplay an achievement so as not to seem arrogant. You avoid a certain choice to avoid hearing people say that you have changed. And then something happens that is much more serious than simply not being approved of.
A person who might not even like you begins to silently participate in or determine decisions about who you should be. Notice the paradox. You would like that person to have less power over you, but precisely because you desperately need to change their opinion, you end up offering them more power.
They don't even need to be present. Their gaze has been internalized. You start to anticipate it.
It is at this moment that the question stops being: "Why doesn't this person like me? " And it becomes another, more important question. Why do I need so much to be acquitted in the court this person built for me?
Perhaps because being considered a good person is an important part of the image you have of yourself. And that is not a problem. We all need some coherence between what we believe we are and what we do.
The difficulty appears when this coherence permanently depends on the confirmation of others. If someone calls you selfish , you immediately need to prove that you are generous. If someone says you’re a bad daughter, you start listing everything you’ve ever done for your family.
If someone claims you’ve changed, you feel the need to prove that you are still the same person. In that moment, all it takes is for someone to threaten your internal image for you to rearrange your behavior just to please them. Perhaps there is a very difficult freedom in accepting that throughout life, you will be the villain in some people’s stories.
Some people have already decided not to like you. And I’m not saying that all these stories will be unfair. In some of them, you will have genuinely been wrong.
Maybe you’ve hurt someone, been immature, made poor decisions, or caused pain that you only understood long after. Maturity is also being able to look at that without building a justification for everything . But there will be other stories where you will be described in a way that simply isn't you.
A boundary you set will be called abandonment. A choice will be called selfishness. Selfishness .
A necessary change will be interpreted as ingratitude. And perhaps you will never be able to reorganize or change that narrative. That is why there is a fundamental difference between listening to criticism and living according to someone else's judgment.
When someone says something difficult about you, it’s worth asking: "Is there any truth in this that I’m not yet able to see? " If there is, look at it. Talk to people you trust.
Acknowledge what needs to be acknowledged. Apologize if necessary and change when you realize you need to change. But after making that move, honestly, there is a second question: Is this person trying to understand me, or are they just looking to confirm what they’ve already decided to believe about me?
Because those who truly wish to understand can still be surprised by an answer. Now, those who only want to confirm a narrative, a belief about you, turn practically any answer into evidence. And if this type of conversation helps you look differently at relationships, behaviors , your life, and ideas that may have been consuming your energy for a long time, I want to invite you to subscribe to our channel.
Every week we use psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the thoughts of great authors to understand what happens to us beyond the surface. Subscribe and stay with me, because perhaps the most difficult part of this conversation isn't accepting that someone doesn't like you. Perhaps the most difficult part is understanding what to do after accepting that.
You don't need to become indifferent. You don't need to develop that artificial stance of someone who claims they don't care about anyone’s opinion. We are relational beings and the way we are perceived matters.
Some opinions should matter, and a lot, especially when they come from people who know us deeply, love us, and have the courage to confront us when necessary. Maturing is not about stopping listening. Maturing is about developing the criteria to decide who you give the authority to participate in building what you think about yourself.
Jung helps us remember that no one looks at another person without carrying their own inner world along. Epictetus reminds us that there is a boundary between what we can govern and what will never be under our control. Perhaps growing emotionally means learning to stay on that boundary without falling into either extreme, neither building your entire life to receive approval, nor becoming so defensive that any criticism is treated as someone else's problem.
You are responsible for what you do, for what you say, for the consequences of your choices, and for the courage to admit when you are wrong. But you cannot take responsibility for all the versions of you that will exist in other people's heads. People who will know a small part of your story and will believe they know the whole book.
People who will—who benefited from your lack of boundaries—and will call your change selfishness. And people who simply won't like you. Perhaps this is the hardest point.
You don't need to convince them otherwise to continue knowing who you are. There is a huge difference between being a good person and needing everyone to believe that you are a good person. The first requires character, responsibility, and the capacity to reflect on yourself and your own life.
The second requires controlling something that no human being has ever managed to control completely: the minds of others. Think about that.
