Being Shunned for Being Wrong…and Right?
Most of us think that looking “bad” by being “wrong” is frightening, but what about being punished, ridiculed, or rejected for being “right” about things?
Am I Right or Am I Wrong Or…Both?
Have you ever thought about how standing in your truth or speaking up about things that you know are true makes you feel vulnerable? Perhaps when you were little there was a person in your life who absolutely could not handle it when you were correct about something, looking amazing, being smarter, more athletic, or more talented in some way or, in their wounded mind, “better” than them. They could not allow you to make them look “dumb” by being smart about something or “less than” by being good at something. It played on their fears about being a fraud, inadequate, inferior, or a failure. Someone in their early life might not have been able to allow them to be right or the center of attention (which children need to be for some part of the time to develop in a healthy way). The generational trauma continues on and on until we stop it, right?
And what about if someone else in your young life was not okay with you being wrong, not smart, looking less than, being too much, or even too big? This might seem like a better alternative, but what if, due to their wounding, they needed you to be perfect—look fit or thin enough, be smart, not be too emotional or “weird” or “out there,” perform well in athletics, or whatever they thought would make you successful in life so they would appear to be a good enough caregiver? Maybe they were trying to create in you someone that could finally make them feel like they were acceptable because as a child they felt like they were not. And what if you couldn’t live up to this caregiver’s expectations because the other caregiver who needed you to be wrong and less than was too threatened by you shining and became enraged when you were right or too sparkly? This might also have happened in the same caregiver as well. He or she told you that you looked amazing in an outfit one day and the next day asked you why you wore an outfit that made you look fat and gross. It’s completely confusing.
Deciding That You Don’t Matter
Maybe you decided long ago that it was better to play it small, be wrong, and not rock the boat with loved ones or friends who could not handle being “wrong.” You decided that to speak up and argue with them would cause conflict or worse. The people in your life may have threatened to or might actually have abused you in some way for countering their beliefs. That is very scary for a child. To have your mother or father screaming and yelling at you, calling you names, raging at you, giving you the silent treatment, or hitting you because you don’t completely agree with them would make anyone think twice about speaking up ever again. When we inadvertently hit on someone else’s unhealed wounding, their very angry inner child or parts that feel inferior or betrayed can rise up, lash out, and become violent. So, instead of trying to fight someone bigger than you, you might have made the decision to be quiet, passive, not make waves or cause conflict, be small, and seem invisible in order to simply survive. You made yourself irrelevant and unimportant simply to blend in, go unnoticed, and stay alive. You had no choice, really.
Your very credibility was at stake each time you opened your mouth, even if you were simply saying that the sky was blue. For whatever reason, they needed to argue that the sky was green instead. You were gaslighted into believing that what you saw with your very eyes or knew to be true from reading or learning about it was wrong simply because that person could not deal with you being correct. Even if it was common sense or a well-documented scientific study that someone else proved to be correct, that Oprah herself was highlighting on her show, or it hit the nightly news as the newest discovery that helps humankind, if you stated it was true, it was met with criticism, shaming, and being told “you think you are better than me” or something along those lines. That is called a “them” problem, but when you are a child and depend on those grown ups to have your back, you are forced to believe them over you. This is traumatizing and abusive and it grooms you to be a person that people can easily fool, lie to, manipulate, abuse, and control because you will believe anything they say or at least not confront them on their skewed reality. You have been taught that letting the other person win is safer for you than confronting them about their behavior or inaccurate information. You learned that you can’t and don’t really matter because no matter what you say, you simply cannot be heard, seen, understood, or believed for what you know to be true or value as a good thing.
Becoming A Person Who Is Safer Being Wrong and Less Than
As time went on, this is what you came to embody. This became your identity, and you continued doing this in your life in school, work, friend groups, with strangers, and also with love partners. If you stop to think about it, do you notice that you act the same way and certain things happen to you over and over again in all the areas of your life? Do you notice that all the people in your life seem to treat you in the same way? No matter where you go and who you are with, there you are—having the same kind of “Groundhog Day” moments over and over again.
This can show up in things like: giving the bully at school all of your stuffed animals or toys or even your mother’s jewelry or the family pet just so you won’t make the bully mad at you; or later in high school you are sort of part of the mean girls club where you are the fall guy for them to use as their punching bag so they can feel superior; or at work when you work the hardest on a project when no one else is contributing and then allowing someone else to take all the credit for it while you get passed up on the promotion. It can also look like being in a marriage where you always have to allow your partner to be right out of a fear they will become insanely angry or jealous toward you. They are in it to win it and they need to compete with you instead of love you and allow both of you to be a little right or just to simply agree to disagree. Or, even “better,” just like that caregiver who told you the outfit looked great and then took it back by saying you looked fat in it, you are with someone who celebrates you and wants you to look good and be successful some of the time, and then turns on you and berates you by telling you that you are not right, not smart enough to know the difference between what is right and wrong, and looks at you like you have three heads and should be placed into a wildlife sanctuary in order for you to be kept “safe” because you obviously should not be wandering the streets where innocent people are roaming and could be harmed by your off-base beliefs and ideas.
You might notice that this happens usually when you are right about something or looking good or being happy. Being right and good enough is the issue here. For so many reasons, there are many people who simply cannot handle others being right because it makes them feel like they have to be wrong; for them, being wrong might have been met with punishment, rejection, or neglect when they were young. It really is not for us to ask “why” here because unless that person starts to recognize how they are acting and seeks to change it, they will not see what they are doing as wrong. They will not necessarily even notice that they are doing it at all, actually. Unless they hit some kind of rock bottom in their life, they won’t feel the sting of their behavior in order to change. Usually, this kind of person has enough sycophants in their corner who are scared of them, or blindly agreeing with them, or wanting to be like them that they find no reason to change. They always have a source of external validation to keep them feeling right and justified in their need to never be wrong. As someone who is close to this kind of person, when you are wrong, you are actually better off since these kinds of people would rather be miserable with you in a lower position than them than be miserable with you when you are happy and flying high and in a “higher” position than them. To decide to be “wrong” feels like a better choice unless you decide to change.
Living a No-Win Life
Talk about the pickle of all pickles. You can’t win. You aren’t allowed to be right or wrong in your life. You are in a double bind here because you have parts within your internal self that are constantly battling between themselves. This leaves you very confused about how to believe yourself, so you simply defer to others to tell you what’s true, right, and good for you. It just seems easier that way anyway. It’s better than fighting with people to believe your perspective and having to worry about them rejecting or abandoning you. You choose to reject and abandon yourself instead. Additionally, you can end up having what is known as a Dorsal Vagal Shutdown whereby your nervous system shuts down in any number of ways simply to protect you and help you conserve energy. After all, this inner chaos causes a lot of anxiety and stress which can activate the nervous system and put you into a continual fight or flight reaction which harms the body and mind. So, your body protects you by making you freeze, fawn by people pleasing, go numb, or do things to make yourself numb. You may use substances, food, or sex to escape and feel calm. You might feel depressed or tired and hopeless. You stop caring anymore about anything and you might even feel suicidal. After all, you have been taught that standing up for yourself is met with anger, mocking, being discounted, or dismissed as someone who does not know much of anything. Because people in your young life simply would not let you win or be right because they had to win at all costs, you are now in relationships and jobs where it is the same thing again and again. Why wouldn’t you kind of give up on yourself if you felt trapped like this?
How can you possibly know the right way to be? How can you trust yourself when everywhere you look people are expecting you to be perfect and have it all figured out or hating you for acting like you know too much or think you’re “all that” because you take good care of yourself and look amazing?
Why Does This Continue to Happen Even If We Know Where It Stems From?
Even if you know where your trauma comes from and you’ve talked it out with yourself, your friends and family, your pastor, or your therapist for years on end and you fully and completely understand why your caregivers led you astray and betrayed you in this way, and even if you have a lot of compassion for them and for yourself for everything they went through and did to you as a result of their childhood trauma, it does not change the fact that you were made to believe on some level that you deserved to be rejected and abused for being right or wrong. Even if you know in your heart that your parents would never intentionally hurt you and even if they have apologized for missing the parenting mark a lot of the time, you still got hurt. It still happened. It happens to all of us to one degree or another. It’s part of the life circumstance, truly. You still internalized their words and actions as your fault in some way. This is just what kids do.
You are attracting all of these kinds of people and life situations into your world because the world reflects back to you what you believe about yourself on the inside. Simply noticing the recurring patterns in your life and relationships is the first step to changing them.
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
This is what we are saying when we attribute the phrase, “Be the change you want to see in the world” to Gandhi. This previous, longer quote is what he actually said, but it is the same message. Why is this true? It is because we live in a mirroring universe. Whenever we are tempted to blame others for what they are doing to us, remember that no one does to us what we are not doing to ourselves first. As little kids, when our caregivers behaved in certain ways based on their unhealed trauma, we internalized it all to mean that we were “not good enough,” “a bad boy,” “unimportant,” or “unlovable” simply because we had to believe that we could control our parents’ feelings and behaviors. This is a survival instinct that children have before they are old enough to think abstractly, to think critically through all the various reasons Mom or Dad might have become angry or violent, and to know how to regulate their emotions. They need to find safety in their caregivers, so they learn fast how to make their caregivers happy so they will continue to dole out the nurturing and love the child needs to survive and to thrive. When we were made to feel afraid by being punished because we were right or wrong about things, our inner critic was formed and shamed us into behaving appropriately so that we would be able to “do the right things” in order to survive. This inner critic and the false beliefs we created from our caregivers’ messages are no longer needed when we are functional adults, but we often have not learned to move them to the back of our minds and lives so that we, as healthy adults, can be in charge of our lives now.
It Really Is Okay to Be Right and Wrong Sometimes
When you make the decision to stand in and speak your truth, have boundaries, and stop apologizing for being right or wrong some of the time without worrying about rejection, you have made the choice be happy. No, it is not true that being right instead of opting to be passive sometimes will make you an attention-seeking blow-hard and that being wrong sometimes will make you a failure or a loser. We can be BOTH things some of the time and be normal. It actually is normal to be both of these things at times. When we forgive ourselves for being a “show off” when we are correct about something we actually ARE correct about and when we can hold ourselves in love and compassion when we say something really wrong and sound totally stupid, we learn to be gentle with ourselves and forgive our mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes some of the time after all.
When we are so afraid of being seen as wrong, we often overcompensate and become even more grandiose in our being right. We talk louder, suck the energy out of the room, pull out all the data and try to “prove” we are just as good as everyone else. And when we are so overly concerned with seeming like a total know-it-all, we will swing the other way and act more like a dunce who does not even know her own name in order to not appear so smart and make others jealous or reject us. We might even act clumsy, ditzy, and like a class clown to make people believe that we are not trying to act like we are better than anyone else. We pump ourselves up or we dumb ourselves down to impress others instead of just being okay knowing what we know and not knowing what we don’t. We simply cannot know EVERYTHING and we certainly do know SOME things. Right?
You CAN change now. You CAN recover from all of this trauma and move forward. You CAN be the change you want to see in the world by changing yourself on the inside. Remember that the outer reflects the inner. If your life is going around and around in a loop of confusion, uncertainty, and pain, you CAN change it. All of it.
If you struggle with an inner critic who bullies you for being right or wrong (or both) or parts inside yourself that are in constant combat and you want to change and embody a life where you don’t need to apologize for taking up space, please contact me for help and support for this. Using my coaching skills and tools, we can move you past all of this and onto a new neural pathway and into embodying a healthier internal landscape which will make you stand taller and more confidently in the world and quietly command the respect you deserve. Life should not feel confusing and like a no-win situation where you have to constantly play small and feel trapped just to get along.
Your voice and choice matter and freedom can be yours!
