Kirshenbaum, Mira - Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay

Normal Disrespect

It’s certainly normal for there to be disrespect in relationships. You disappoint each other and you yell at each other. You criticize each other and point out every flaw. You remember every failure. In every sense of the word, you see each other naked, and if nakedness is the source of desire it’s also the source of much sad, disappointing knowledge.

But you also have a lot of ways of coping with this disrespect. Sure, your wife complains about how you’re tired all the time, but for one thing you recognize that she’s just telling the truth, and for another thing you know she cares, and for another thing it’s not as if being a go-getter were the most important thing in the world to you. So, yes, you feel disrespected, but it doesn’t get to you.

Besides, you know that in some important way you’ve not really fallen in your wife’s eyes. The thing that she’s criticizing you for actually isn’t all that important to her.

Coping with Disrespect

Sometimes the disrespect gets really bad and yet you can survive that, too. Perhaps when you first started out together your partner had been convinced that as a smart, talented, driven person you were going to take the business world by storm. Now years later you’ve screwed up badly. You’ve proved yourself to be not only less capable than your partner had thought but in some ways a real screwup, and a lot more lazy than everyone had thought, too. Your partner’s disappointment is palpable. You see every day how you don’t carry the sense of importance to your partner that you used to.

And yet you can cope with this disrespect, partly because you agree with it (you’re disappointed in yourself, too) and partly because on some level it doesn’t really touch you. You’ve developed a sense of who you are and what you care about over the years that’s sturdily impervious to your partner’s disrespect. Maybe you’ve fallen in his eyes, but inside yourself you feel you still stand straight. What’s more, while you know he doesn’t respect you the way he used to you have a sense that he loves you and cares about you anyway.

We’re still in the territory of disrespect that’s normal in relationships, that most people find they can live with, that doesn’t make a relationship, for most people, too bad to stay in. But we’re getting close, now, to that line that, when your partner crosses it, does mean that your relationship is clearly too bad to stay in for the vast majority of people.

Ask yourself this:

Diagnostic question #24. Does your partner do such a good job of conveying the idea that you’re a nut or a jerk or a loser or an idiot about parts of yourself that are important to you that you’ve started to really become demonstrably convinced of it yourself?

What is this question getting at really? Let me tell you about one woman’s experience.

Leila’s Story

Ben, Leila’s husband, decided one day that she was an idiotic nut and a nutty idiot. Perhaps in their conversations she’d been overemotional or not perfectly rational. Perhaps she didn’t know about some of the practical or financial realities Ben knew about. Perhaps she didn’t have the same values. Perhaps Ben wanted to control her. Or perhaps Ben was just one of those macho guys who believed men were from Mars and women were strictly from hunger. Whichever of the many causes were operating, at some point Ben started administering a daily bath of messages designed to convince Leila that she was too neurotic and too just plain dumb to handle things.

“You’re going to screw it up, you always do,” he’d say. “You always make bad choices. I’ve seen the choices you make and I’ve seen how they’re always bad,” he’d say. “You don’t know how to think. You think with your feelings. Your thoughts are a tangled mess,” he’d say.

We think of this kind of stuff as having taken place in the nineteenth century or the 1950s, but I can assure you it’s still going on today. Leila’s not the only woman today on the receiving end of this kind of brutal disrespect. In fact, while you’d think it would diminish with so many women in the workforce proving they’re competent in the larger world, the degree to which some men are threatened actually serves to increase expressions of disrespect like this. But I don’t want to make this a gender issue, because it’s not. Men are on the receiving end of disrespect at roughly the same rate as women.

Here’s what happened with this disrespect Leila was assaulted with. She didn’t have much protection. Hers wasn’t one of those cases where the disrespect is as annoying as hell, but just doesn’t convince you that it’s true. For Leila, Ben’s disrespect did real damage when he did such a good job of putting her down that she started believing his statements about her, about things she couldn’t change. And then she started being destroyed from within even as her world of possibilities was destroyed around her. I am crazy, she thought, I am stupid.

And just the way an anorectic starves herself because the mirror “tells” her she’s too fat, Leila did what you do when you believe you’re crazy and stupid: she acted crazy and stupid.

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut

If the words that are used to put you down really do convince you you’re a nut or a jerk or an idiot or a loser, you just give up, because these are things you can’t do anything about. So if your partner convinces you you’re a nut, the same kind of thing might happen to you that happened to one man whose wife disrespected him to the point of convincing him he was a nut.

She said so many times, “You always go to weird places with things. You always make crazy connections,” that he felt he was a bad influence on their children. He started having less and less to do with his kids out of fear that he’d somehow contaminate them with his “mental illness.” Whenever they’d ask him a question, he’d say ask your mother. I know from working with him that he fell well within the norms of mental health. But his wife’s disrespect damaged him by depriving him of his role as a father.

The damage that occurs when your partner’s disrespect convinces you you’re a jerk or a nut or an idiot or a loser doesn’t just have to come from the things you start doing or stop doing. One woman whose husband convinced her she was simply an awful human being got so depressed as a result of this that she ended up being hospitalized.

This process is a lot like what you might have seen in the old Ingrid Bergman movie Gaslight, where her husband, played by Charles Boyer, convinces her she’s crazy and so she acts crazy and stays locked up. But there’s a difference, too. In the movie there was a deliberate plot against her. In the process I’m talking about here with disrespect, the partner isn’t necessarily doing anything deliberately. But the effects can be just as devastating.

Here’s the guideline for where to draw the line between disrespect that’s annoying and disrespect that makes a relationship too bad to stay in:

GUIDELINE #24

If your partner is starting to convince you through disrespectful words and actions that you’re a nut or a jerk or a loser or an idiot about parts of yourself that are important to you, then he’s starting to damage the way you see yourself and your entire sense of what you’re able to do. For almost everyone in a relationship where disrespect reaches this point, they’re happy when they leave and unhappy if they stay. Quick take: If someone is starting to cut your legs out from under you, you’ve got to walk out while you still have legs.