I Dislike In You What I Dislike In Me
After being abroad for most of my adult life, I have been back in the US living with and spending time with my parents the last few months. This has meant that I frequent many of the same places I did as a kid. One of these places is the community center gym where I spent considerable time pumping iron in high school.
On a recent visit to the gym on a Tuesday at 4pm, I was surprised to re-learn that weekday afternoons are prime time for the high school crowd. Much to my chagrin, the weights area was packed with 15 post pubescent boys wearing cut-off shirts checking themselves out in the mirror. While I waited for some bench space to clear up so I could do my presses, I watched as one boy after the next would walk up to the mirror, do a biceps and a triceps flex, lift up his shirt so he could admire his abs, rub his pec muscle back and forth a couple of times, lift up his chin and nod at himself, and then look around to make sure that no one was watching.
As I observed these shenanigans unfold, I noticed myself experiencing intense judgment. These boys think they are such hot shit. All these boys care about is how they look on TikTok. Their muscles aren’t even big enough to justify admiration.
The judgment turned into disdain for the boys. It also turned into a feeling of shame on their behalf. Don’t these boys have any self-respect?
As I reflect on this experience and look a little deeper at what’s in my heart, it is painfully obvious why my judgment showed up so intensely. The reflection of the boys in the mirror was also a reflection of myself.
While the stages of life are very different, the key ingredients are the same: a preoccupation with body image, a desperation to be desired, and at its core, a deep insecurity about self-worth masked by feelings of grandiosity.
I was those boys when I was in high school. And I am those boys now. The shame I felt was not as much shame on their behalf. It was more the shame I felt about myself. The disdain I felt was not as much the disdain for what the boys were doing to themselves. It was more the disdain for the boys having reminded me of my shame.
What we dislike most in others is often what we dislike most in ourselves.
The dislike is the coping mechanism. It is our way of distancing ourselves from the behavior and from the underlying insecurity that drives the behavior.
As C.S. Lewis wrote, “...if you want to find out how proud you are, the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me…or patronise me, or show off?’...It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise.”
This is what makes spending time with family members so triggering. We spend, or used to spend, a lot of time around them, and so we are intimately familiar with their stuff. And because we are cut from the same cloth, their stuff reminds us of our stuff. Ram Dass captured it when he said, “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.”
Anxiety runs pretty rampant in my family. I don’t consider myself a particularly anxious person, but that’s because I have worked hard to stamp it out. Projecting confidence, speaking in a loud voice, stating opinions as facts, overpreparation, spending time in areas of my life I know that I am good at, and avoiding the areas of life where I am not as successful, are all ways that I deal with (i.e., suppress) my anxiety. When I see anxiety in family members, I often get annoyed and judge them as weak. This judgment shows up in both nonverbal and verbal communication, usually through short outbursts of frustration. Stop worrying about everything! For the other person, it can feel like a rejection of not only their feelings, but also of who they are.
When I look a little deeper, I can see my reaction is driven by my own shame around my emotional vulnerabilities. My ego clings tightly to the identity of an emotionally resilient strongman. When someone else gets anxious, I feel anxious as well. That’s natural. The issue is that my ego worries that maybe I’m not such an emotionally resilient strongman. In other words, maybe I’m not who I thought I was. That’s painful. The judgment and irritation are defense mechanisms that prevent me from feeling the pain. But because of the emotional escalation, I am often not aware of or honest about what is really happening, and all the person on the receiving end experiences is the judgment.
Materialism is also something I tend to be judgmental of when I see it in those I love. This shows up in tuning out when my wife starts talking about some clothing she loves that she found while shopping or feeling irked when the Fedex delivery person rings the doorbell an hour after the Amazon delivery truck departed. Despite my ego identity as a zenned-out minimalist, I have more than a few times in the last month spent too much time browsing Amazon looking for nothing in particular. I feel so much shame about my own materialism that when my wife walks into the room during one of my browsing sessions, I will immediately shut my laptop and jump up from my seat as if I’ve just finished up a work email and am now excited to spend some time with her. In reality, I am trying not to get caught.
And even if we genuinely think our tendencies are distinct from the behaviors that we disdain in others, we just need to look a little deeper to see what is underneath the surface.
I am working with a coaching client who has a prestigious job at an investment bank and is one of the most unpretentious, down-to-earth people I know. She truly defies the banker stereotype because of her humility. Even though arrogant behavior is all around her, it bothers her when she witnesses or is on the receiving end of it. Her aversion toward that kind of behavior had gotten so intense that she was not able to do her job effectively because she was avoiding connection with people whom she judged as arrogant, which is a sizable proportion of people. In a recent coaching session, we were exploring her “overactive arrogance radar,” and at some point in the conversation, in a very innocent way she said, “I take a lot of pride in not having a big ego.” There was a moment of silence, and then we both started laughing. Her next words, “Oh my gosh, I have such a big ego about not having an ego.”
The judgment and the disdain are signals. They alert us to where we need to explore and where we need to ask some deeper questions. They help us discover our shame, which can be ridiculously hard to find if you, like me, happen to be skilled at burying it.
To get started, here are 3 questions that you can explore in a journal, with a coach, or in the presence of someone you trust:
What is one thing I am judgmental of others about?
How is this also true about me?
In what way does knowing it is true about me bring up shame?
Notice the second question is “how is this also true about me?” not “is this true about me?” The question does not call for a “yes” or “no” answer. The presumption is that it is true, and we want to know how it is true.
So…if it pisses me off when others are not reliable, how am I not reliable? If it pisses me off when people get into political debates without having done their homework, how have I also formed my political views without the full picture? If it pisses me off when others are controlling, how am I also controlling? If it pisses me off when others are not self-aware, how do I also lack self-awareness?
This is not to say that we condone other peoples’ behaviors that are affecting us and the world in negative ways. And it may not always be true that what we judge in others is what we judge in ourselves. The question, “how is this also true about me?” is meant to provoke us and may not be relevant in 100% of cases. But before we go about judging the behaviors of another, let us first understand why we are triggered and in what ways we might be able to relate to the behaviors that we believe ourselves to be so adamantly against. When we have this understanding, our actions come from a more honest place and are more likely to have the intended result, especially if we are hoping to help facilitate change in others. And when we are honest about our shame, the shame starts to soften.
In the example of materialism, rather than being on a crusade against everyone in my family buying things, I need to be honest first with myself and then with others about my own shame that I feel when I spend too much on something, when I buy things that I don’t need, or when I see how much packaging Amazon used for the essential oils set I purchased during one of my browsing sessions. The honesty offers oxygen to the people who are suffocating from the judgment.
And we ourselves rarely have the full picture about our own judgments. It can be helpful, in our relationships where there is a sufficient amount of psychological safety, to ask others about where they feel judged by us. We can then use the feedback as entry points to explore using steps 2 and 3 from above.
With sincere effort, this exploration is our ticket to growth and connection. It is our ticket to honest relationships and less hypocrisy. It is our ticket to less shame about our shame. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “In the cave you fear holds the treasure you seek.”
