Dammit, I'm right! ... or am I?

March 12, 2020 8:28 PM

I question myself way too much. This can be helpful, but it often just sends me into an anxiety spiral. How do I distinguish the times I was truly wrong from the times I was right and the other party just insisted I'm wrong?

Some examples:

I walk down a clearly marked path, following the arrows on the floor and flow of traffic. Someone suddenly comes at me and we bump into each other because I can't (or sometimes refuse to, if they look like the type from this question), get out of the way without stepping into oncoming traffic. The other party will look surprised or angry, and I will feel awful about shoulder-checking them. Then I'll spend the rest of the day wondering what my friends would think of my behavior.

I had a supervisor at work who everyone agreed was a bad manager and unnecessarily nitpicky. She would chide me for "issues" my colleagues later said were not issues at all and to just ignore. But how would I distinguish the real, necessary feedback from the nitpicking for the sake of giving criticism every day?

I still feel guilty about that one time I snapped at my high school's resident mean girl. She had been verbally abusive to me, set her boyfriend on me, and had someone pull up my skirt in front of the school. At some point I insulted her intelligence and everyone around us was like, "whoa, Loony, that was so uncalled for! What's wrong with you?" I know her IQ had nothing to do with the way she was behaving, it was just low-hanging fruit to me because she acted like a ditz to seem harmless.

Some guy half sat on me on the train, and when I asked him to stop squishing me, he said that wasn't possible and I should go sit somewhere else (there were no empty seats) if I didn't like it, in a very patronizing way. I remember going home shaking after that, wondering if I had been wrong, when in fact it's a known problem that men here take up too much space on the train.

Another guy swam into me from behind in the public pool we used to visit, which was against the rules. The life guard told ME I should have gotten out of the way (where?? And he came up from behind!!), and gave me a huge lecture on "giving others preference" and "coexisting", and it was humiliating. I refuse to go back to that pool, which means I don't get to enjoy swimming anymore as it's the only one close enough to my apartment.


You have probably guessed by now that I am a somewhat anxious person (I am in therapy) who has trouble trusting her own perceptions. My parents would often yell at me or tell me horrible things and then later deny it ever happened, e.g. my mother would complain to me about my father and say she would leave him if it weren't for me, then later claim I was making things up and I must be crazy. I have very limited contact with her these days, but years of being called too sensitive and overreacting and crybaby by my parents have left their mark. In some of the above situations, like the last one, at least in my own head I am pretty sure the other party was wrong. But I have so many doubts, and I keep ruminating on these encounters, wondering if maybe I am indeed just crazy and I go through life being wrong and harming others while playing the victim?

Has anyone here dealt with similar feelings, and managed to either overcome them or figure out what the heck was right and what was wrong?

posted by LoonyLovegood to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

I don't know of a better way to deal with this than keeping on checking on a case by case basis until intuition about cases of that kind adapts enough to make that usually unnecessary.

To that end:

I walk down a clearly marked path, following the arrows on the floor and flow of traffic. Someone suddenly comes at me and we bump into each other because I can't (or sometimes refuse to, if they look like the type from this question), get out of the way without stepping into oncoming traffic. The other party will look surprised or angry, and I will feel awful about shoulder-checking them. Then I'll spend the rest of the day wondering what my friends would think of my behavior.

If you're involved in a genuinely unavoidable pedestrian-to-pedestrian collision that you saw coming and the other party didn't, and it's your therefore-prepared shoulder that hits some other part of them, then that's on them, not on you.

If you actually could have avoided colliding with other pedestrians at the time you first became aware of an impending pedestrian-to-pedestrian collision, and you didn't, then that's on you.

However, assuming the collision was as is usual minor, and that nobody was actually injured, what it is that's on you or on them is similarly minor. So if you find yourself dwelling on it at length then the actual problem you need to attend to is getting unstuck from rumination, not the rights or wrongs of pedestrian collisions.

It's not usually in anybody's best interest to trigger clearly predictable surprise and/or anger in others, but if it can't be avoided it can't be avoided and that's that. In any case, somebody else's surprise and/or anger is theirs to manage, not yours to worry about.

Sometimes, deliberately shoulder-checking somebody else on purpose is tactically and/or strategically completely sound. Evaluating this requires a good understanding of the prevailing power dynamics.

I had a supervisor at work who everyone agreed was a bad manager and unnecessarily nitpicky. She would chide me for "issues" my colleagues later said were not issues at all and to just ignore. But how would I distinguish the real, necessary feedback from the nitpicking for the sake of giving criticism every day?

By recognizing and anticipating the larger pattern (that there generally is some kind of criticism handed out each day), offering a lip-service acknowledgement to today's criticism (the magic response: "I hear what you say and I'll take that on board", which is Beige Corporate Deniable for "fuck off, you nitpicking arsehole") then checking with a trusted colleague before resolving to give more than lip-service attention to anything that you don't immediately recognize as bullshit.

I still feel guilty about that one time I snapped at my high school's resident mean girl. She had been verbally abusive to me, set her boyfriend on me, and had someone pull up my skirt in front of the school. At some point I insulted her intelligence and everyone around us was like, "whoa, Loony, that was so uncalled for! What's wrong with you?" I know her IQ had nothing to do with the way she was behaving, it was just low-hanging fruit to me because she acted like a ditz to seem harmless.

I still feel regret for that one time I told my then-girlfriend that she didn't have the spirit of a craftsman after the velcro-attached insect screen she'd made for the front window of our Kombi fell off and leaked mosquitoes before the one I eventually took six times longer to make stayed put and worked perfectly. It was an insufferably arrogant thing to have said and I wish I hadn't said it.

But I don't feel guilt about having said that, just regret. The right way to process past behaviour that we now see as unacceptable, it seems to me, is to transmute regret into policy: if a similar circumstance were to recur in future, I'd remind myself to behave less ungraciously before opening my flapping great mouth.

I think that were I in your shoes, my regret around the mean girl incident would be mainly due to not having got it together to slap her. She's owed no amends at all for the overdue retaliation you chose to deploy instead. Let that one go.

Some guy half sat on me on the train, and when I asked him to stop squishing me, he said that wasn't possible and I should go sit somewhere else (there were no empty seats) if I didn't like it, in a very patronizing way. I remember going home shaking after that, wondering if I had been wrong

You were not wrong, and you were shaking because you'd just been bullied by an abusive arsehole and none of the bystanders (bysitters?) had had the guts to come to your clearly well-deserved defence. It sucks. There is no excuse for that person to have behaved in that way.

Another guy swam into me from behind in the public pool we used to visit, which was against the rules. The life guard told ME I should have gotten out of the way (where?? And he came up from behind!!), and gave me a huge lecture on "giving others preference" and "coexisting", and it was humiliating. I refuse to go back to that pool, which means I don't get to enjoy swimming anymore as it's the only one close enough to my apartment.

To me that looks like clear grounds for a formal written complaint to pool management against the lifeguard, then going back to the pool after management has acknowledged and promised to act on that complaint.

I have so many doubts, and I keep ruminating on these encounters, wondering if maybe I am indeed just crazy and I go through life being wrong and harming others while playing the victim?

I strongly doubt that you're crazy, and nor do I believe that you go through life being wrong and harming others while playing the victim. Far more likely that you're pretty much like everybody else, getting some things right and some things wrong and learning from your mistakes and improving your autonomous adulting skills over time.

There is no fits-all-situations magic formula to getting adulting right all the time. Living autonomously is hard and interacting with other people is exponentially harder. We all make far more little mistakes that scarcely matter at all in the grand scheme of things than genuine errors worth pondering. That said, "it's not all about me" and "let that one through to the keeper" are a couple of useful thoughts I use frequently for immediate dropping of minor unpleasantness that I don't want to be still chewing on four weeks later.

Your parents' gaslighting has established a longstanding habit of rumination and self-doubt, but that's all it is. You're not doomed to keep replaying that habit for the rest of your life. Therapy will surely help you find your way to identifying some less self-destructive internal behaviours and practising those deliberately until they become your new habits.

All the best. Keep smiling.
posted by flabdablet at 9:58 PM on March 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

In half of those examples there *is* no fixed right or wrong. Trying to determine it based on how the other person reacted is no use; their reaction is based on what kind of day they’re having, or how much sleep they got last night, or other things that have nothing to do with you.

In the end the only real judgment of your behavior can come from you. How would you have felt in the other person‘s position? Given a chance to do it again, would you make the same choices? Was the situation just going to be uncomfortable no matter what you did?

That last is important. Situations where the best answer is a compromise that leaves everyone unsatisfied are a staple of life. Right and wrong need not apply.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:18 PM on March 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Anyone who makes you feel bad about this stuff is either wrong, or you are way too vulnerable to their feedback, but from the look of things various bullies are using your anxiety from being bullied or in conflict to make you feel social anxiety.

If you and someone else walk into each other and they act annoyed they are using aggression to dominate socially. Unless you did something remarkably stupid, like drunk drive after being told not to, shaming is inappropriate on their part. If you and your bff collide you laugh. If you and a stranger collide you say, "whoops, sorry!" and smile at each other and keep going.

Half your examples seemed to be when predators noticed that your personal space was vulnerable and moved in on you and told you they had the right to do it. In one case they double teamed you, something predatory/rape culture guys will do.

In the two other cases you were up against a bully. In one case the rest of the group joined in the bullying, in the other they backed you up. But here is the thing. In no case should people be trying to make you feel bad. If they are trying to make you feel bad they are not to be trusted. Decent ordinary people try to make you feel better and try to save your face when you do something wrong in a social situation.

A good friend would have taken you aside and said, "Might want to avoid calling her dumb - it gives her a chance to claim you were mean to her and is insulting to people who really do struggle that way." A good lifeguard would have said, "Yeah, he probably had his head down and was doing laps and didn't see you - that's the lap lane, there, stay out of that, and if he runs into you anywhere else let me know and I'll boot him from the pool."

But since they only doubled down on the bullying/aggressive behaviour you know that their message was not factual.

You can tell if you are way too sensitive if they had said, "Hey no, it's alright," or looked upset for a moment but then cleared their face and smiled and didn't lecture, and you STILL went home and fretted about it. If you had told the guy he was crowding you and he had apologized, explained he had sat next to you so he could see the platform at the next stop where his friend would be waiting and stood up, and then you kept feeling bad, then you were too sensitive. That is not what is happening.

I think that you have been made miserable by hostility aimed at you, but in trying to gain a sense of control are blaming yourself, the way a rape victim blames themself - "I should never have..." No, it's not what you did, it's that malefic people targeted you. Being upset is not unreasonable, but don't be upset at yourself.

The lifeguard at your pool confirmed that it is not a safe place to swim because they enable predators there. Sexual assaults in pools are actually quite common. It's generally the cop a feel in the water situation in crowded circumstances. Sometimes it happens in packs and the hold the woman underwater so they can all get a good feel. There are pools where it is not safe because the lifeguards do not protect the safety of the swimmers. It's good you are not swimming there. What sucks is that it is not a safe pool.
posted by Jane the Brown at 4:43 AM on March 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

If someone crowds you deliberately on a train or bus, lean slightly against them and get out a kleenex and blow your nose. Or cough. Don't call them on anything, just act like you are perfectly willing to be that crowded but can't wait to look after your mucus. If they glare at you tell them "I didn't wand to sneeze." Predatory crowdy guys do not want you leaning on them, they want you to lean away, tense up and whimper. So lean in and get slimy.
posted by Jane the Brown at 4:55 AM on March 13, 2020 [6 favorites]

Best answer: I used to get stuck really badly in these ruminative loops, and it was rough especially because I was working in a heavy customer-service job where I would have at least one incident a day of "was I a jerk? was the other person a jerk? what went wrong here?" And - I think part of it getting better for me, was accepting that sometimes you don't know, but the only useful thing you can do is to let it go.

The only useful thing you can do about an incident that you regret is to
a) figure out if an apology is warranted, and apologize if so;
b) figure out if there's something you should do differently next time, and figure out how to make that happen.

So if someone walks into you when you're standing on the arrows and can't get out of the way without walking into oncoming traffic -

a) You weren't doing anything wrong by standing there, so why apologize? The other person walked into you because they weren't paying attention, not because you were somewhere you shouldn't have been
b) There was not a better place to stand than on the arrows, so there's nothing to do differently next time.

If someone bullies you until you snap,

a) It's not great to insult someone's intelligence, but their treatment of you was so starkly worse than your treatment of them that it only makes sense to apologize if you think an apology would have strategic value. It is useful to let your bully know that you're not a doormat, and you have your limits, and you're willing to strike back if you need to, and an apology might undermine that. There have been a lot of times I regretted being meaner than necessary to someone but they treated me better once they figured out they couldn't walk on me infinitely. And anyway, that stops being relevant once you're no longer in school with that person - the statute of limitations has passed!
b) You might think about alternate ways to react if you're facing harassment in the future, but school can be a uniquely horrible petri dish for harassment, so it's probably not helpful to strategize too much beyond "If I feel that I'm getting pushed close to the snapping point, I should try to figure out good ways to deal with that that won't involve me acting in a way I would regret."

Once I have figured out those things, I try to gently remind myself, every time I start dwelling on it, that I have done all the thinking I need to do about it, I'm not going to fix anything by continuing to think about it, that I acted in the best way I knew how to do or had the resources to do, and that it's okay for me to just let it be a done thing. And a lot of the time I have to accept that I don't know why the other person acted the way they did, I don't know what I could or should have done differently, but it's okay to forgive myself and move forward.

And I let myself get a little angry.

Usually, when I get stuck in self-recrimination, it's because I'm angry but I won't let myself feel it or admit it, and it feels easier to blame myself than to get angry at someone else. And if you're at fault, that works, it's okay! It feels horrible, but at least it makes sense. But if my brain is trying to reconcile "This is my fault" with "I was standing on the arrows? Where else was I supposed to have been standing? Should I have walked into oncoming traffic?" then I get stuck, because I can't figure out how to blame myself but I also can't tolerate being mad at the other person.

So I needed to learn how to tolerate being mad at the other person. Not responding with anger in the moment, necessarily, but allowing myself to feel the emotion. And to tolerate the other person being mad at me. It's not easy. I'm not great at it even after a lot of therapy. But I think I've had to let go of my expectation that it should be easy, that all social interactions should run without friction.
posted by Jeanne at 8:16 AM on March 13, 2020 [4 favorites]