You are teaching people to disrespect you right now and you have no idea you are doing it. I spent 43 years as a clinical psychologist listening to people describe the same problem over and over. Someone does not respect them.
A boss, a parent, a spouse, a friend, and they want to know how to make that person change. After four decades of this, I finally understood something that most people never figure out. You cannot make anyone respect you.
That is not how respect works. But you can stop doing the things that actively invite disrespect into your life. And you are doing those things today, probably within the last hour.
I want you to understand something before we go any further. I am not here to make you feel good. I am not going to tell you to stand in front of a mirror and recite affirmations or visualize your best self or any of that nonsense.
What I am going to tell you comes from listening to thousands of people describe their relationships and watching the patterns repeat across decades. What I am going to tell you is going to be uncomfortable because it requires you to look at your own behavior instead of pointing at everyone else. Here is the first thing.
Stop giving people detailed explanations for your decisions. I mean this seriously. Every time someone questions a choice you have made and you launch into a justification, you are sending a message.
The message is that your decisions require their approval, that you need them to understand and agree before you can proceed. Research in psychology has repeatedly shown that excessive self-justification is associated with lower perceived confidence and authority. When you explain yourself to people who have no legitimate reason to require an explanation, you position yourself beneath them in the interaction.
You make yourself smaller. I had a patient once, a woman in her 40s, brilliant architect, who could not understand why her mother still treated her like a child. Every time her mother questioned something, a career move, a parenting choice, anything, this woman would spend 20 minutes defending herself.
She would present evidence. She would cite reasons. She would practically build a legal case.
And her mother just kept questioning because the explaining itself was the problem. The explaining said, "I need you to validate this. I made a suggestion.
The next time your mother asks why you did something, say because I decided to and then say nothing else. She looked at me like I had asked her to jump off a building. She could not imagine it.
But she tried it and she called me two weeks later in tears. She said her mother had been confused at first, then irritated, and then for the first time she could remember, actually respectful. The endless explanations had been training her mother to expect a vote on every decision.
When she stopped, the dynamic shifted. Here is the second thing, and this one is harder. You need to become comfortable with silence.
I do not mean the kind of silence where you are seething inside and planning your response. I mean actual silence. When someone says something disrespectful to you, you do not have to respond immediately.
You do not have to respond at all. Research has shown that people who respond instantly to provocation are perceived as more reactive and less authoritative than those who pause. Silence is not passive.
Silence is a choice. It communicates something powerful. It says, "I am not going to play this game with you.
" I had a colleague years ago who was constantly being interrupted in meetings by a younger man who clearly did not take her seriously. She came to me frustrated. She had tried everything.
Asserting herself, calling him out, making jokes. Nothing worked. I suggested she try something different.
The next time he interrupted her, she should stop talking, not argue, not protest, just stop, and then look at him. Just look, do nothing else. She thought it was ridiculous, but she tried it.
She stopped mid-sentence, turned and looked at him for maybe 5 seconds. She said the room went completely still. He actually stumbled over his words, trying to fill the silence she had created.
He never interrupted her again. What she understood in that moment was that his interruptions were designed to provoke a reaction. They fed on her frustration.
When she refused to provide that reaction, when she just looked at him in silence, she took away everything he was hoping to get. The third thing, and I need you to really hear this. You must be willing to lose the relationship.
I know that sounds extreme, but it is the foundation of everything else. If you are not willing to walk away from a relationship where you are consistently disrespected, you have already told the other person they can treat you however they want. You have already communicated that your need for the relationship exceeds your need for respect.
They know this consciously or not. They know it and they will act accordingly. I am not saying you should abandon people at the first sign of conflict.
That would be absurd. But you must have a line, a real line, not a line you keep moving. I learned this in the most painful way possible.
My son Robert and I had a difficult relationship for years. He felt I was too critical of his wife. And he was right.
I was. But when he confronted me about it, I could not admit I was wrong. My pride would not allow it.
So I defended myself. I explained. I justified.
I did everything I just told you not to do. And then one day he stopped calling 18 years ago. I have not heard his voice in 18 years.
He drew a line and I tested it and I lost. I respect him for it even as it breaks my heart. He was willing to lose the relationship with his own mother to preserve his selfrespect and his marriage.
I wish I had been capable of the same clarity when I was younger. I wish I had known when to stop talking. The fourth thing, stop trying to change how people feel about you and start paying attention to what you will and will not accept.
This is the mistake almost everyone makes. They focus on the other person. How do I make them respect me?
How do I get them to see my value? How do I convince them I am worthy? This is backwards.
Completely backwards. You cannot control how another person perceives you. You cannot reach into their brain and adjust their opinion.
What you can control is what you allow into your life, what behavior you tolerate, what treatment you accept. A patient once asked me how to make her husband stop dismissing her opinions. I asked her what happened when he dismissed her.
She said she would argue with him, try to make her case sometimes for hours. I said, "What if you just left the room? What if the moment he dismissed you, you simply stood up and walked out?
No explanation, no announcement, just gone. " She was horrified. She said he would think she was crazy.
I said maybe or maybe he would learn that dismissing you has consequences that you are not available for that kind of treatment. She tried it. The first time he was stunned.
The second time he was angry. The third time before he could dismiss her. He caught himself.
He started thinking before he spoke. She had not changed his mind about her. She had changed what she was willing to accept.
And that changed everything. The fifth thing, this is the one nobody wants to hear. You have to examine whether you actually respect yourself.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth that 43 years of practice taught me. People who genuinely respect themselves rarely have chronic problems with disrespect from others. Not because disrespectful people do not exist.
They absolutely exist. But because people with genuine selfrespect do not stick around for it, they do not tolerate it. They do not make excuses for it.
They do not spend years hoping someone will change. They leave. They create distance.
They enforce their own value through their choices and their behavior. If you are constantly finding yourself in situations where you are disrespected, I am not going to tell you it is your fault. That would be simplistic and cruel.
But I am going to ask you to look honestly at why you stay. What you are getting out of these relationships that keeps you there despite the cost because there is always something. Fear of being alone, financial dependency, family pressure, the hope that things will get better.
These are real. I understand them. But they are also the chains that keep you in place while someone treats you poorly.
And at some point, you have to decide which matters more, the relationship or your selfrespect. I chose wrong with my son. I chose my pride over the relationship.
He chose differently. He chose his selfrespect. And even though it has cost me 18 years of his life, I understand why he did it.
I would do it differently now. I would have apologized. I would have changed.
But I did not have the wisdom then that I have now. That is why I am talking to you. So you do not have to learn these things the way I did.
I am 100 years old. I have listened to more confessions about disrespect than I can count. And here is what I know.
You cannot make anyone respect you. But you can respect yourself so thoroughly, so completely that disrespect simply has no place to land. You can stop explaining yourself to people who have not earned explanations.
You can learn to sit in silence while someone waits for you to react. You can be willing to lose what does not serve you. You can pay attention to what you accept rather than trying to change what others believe.
I am not going to pretend this is easy. I failed at most of it for decades. I am still failing at some of it.
But I am telling you anyway because maybe you will listen. Maybe you will save yourself the time I wasted. Maybe you will call your son before it is too late.
