When People Show You Who They Are, Pay Attention

I was reading something on Reddit the other day about people not thanking ChatGPT (or insert AI chatbot of choice here) for answering questions or providing recommendations for which restaurant one should get takeout from.

There was, perhaps not surprisingly, a large divide between people who are worried about the seemingly inevitable AI uprising and want to be on the “good side” of our new robot overlords and the people who did not see a value in thanking a computer program for doing exactly what it was programmed to do.

From what I could see, no one was asking the question in my mind, which lies along the lines of: what does this say about you, not about what you're afraid of? What does this say about you, and how you value what and who is in your life?

People may bring this up as a red flag in dating (“how do they treat wait staff or people they view as beneath them?”) or in family therapy (“how much should I tolerate before I cut people off?”).

Sometimes clients ask me why I’m not a “hard line-in-the-sand, cut people off” type of clinician. Don’t get me wrong: there are absolutely limits to what we should accept in others' behavior. I am not advocating for individuals to stay in abusive relationships. I am not saying that you should stick around when someone is directly harming you if you have the ability to get out. But, like everything else in the world, there is absolutely a grey area around the question of “how much does this person get to be in my life”

I think a more interesting question is how I model behavior in my relationships.

By the way I treat people, by the graciousness I extend, I can invite people to behave similarly. I can begin an interaction, or participate in an ongoing one, on my own terms, in accordance with how I want to treat people and how I want to move through the world.

That doesn't mean I get to control how someone responds. It means I get to pay attention to how they respond.

Are they going to rise to the standard I am setting? Are they going to fall below it? Will they recognize when they have fallen short and make an effort to repair it? Will they take my graciousness as an invitation to offer the same graciousness in return, or as permission to take advantage of it?

That becomes the data I use to decide who gets to stay in my life, and to what degree.

I don't have to demand that someone behave the way I would behave. I don't have to punish them for falling short of my expectations. These are my rules for how I behave. But I also don't have to keep giving someone the same level of access to me, no matter what they show me.

I can simply pay attention.

I can offer an invitation to participate in a healthier way, and then let their response tell me what I need to know.

I regularly tell clients that all information is good information. I don't want you to avoid asking the question because you're afraid of what the answer might mean. I don't want you to stop paying attention because you already know that, if you find out the truth, you may have to do something about it.

I want you to know if someone is abusive.

I want you to know if you ask your partner for help and they repeatedly refuse to help you.

I want you to know if your friend is talking about you behind your back.

We don't always want to know those things. Sometimes we desperately don't want to know them, because knowing them means we probably have to make a decision. We may have to have a difficult conversation. We may have to change the relationship. We may have to leave it entirely.

But information is still information. And I would rather make a decision based on what is actually happening than protect myself from the information because I don't want to deal with its implications.

The same is true of good information.

I want you to know if someone is capable of growth.

I want you to know what happens when you tell someone that they hurt you. I want you to know whether they become defensive, dismiss you, blame you, or whether they listen. I want you to know whether they can apologize. I want you to know whether they can try again.

Because it is relatively easy to cut someone off and move on. Sometimes that is exactly what we need to do. But there is another option available to us in the gray areas of relationships: we can offer someone an opportunity to do better and then pay attention to what they do with that opportunity.

One of my favorite quotes is, “Never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to stupidity.”

There's wisdom in giving people the opportunity to show they didn't hurt us intentionally. That they didn't understand and can learn. It is harder than simply deciding that someone is a bad person and walking away.

And it does carry risk.

Sometimes we put ourselves in harm's way when we allow someone the opportunity to learn and sometimes to fail while they are learning. That is why discernment matters. An opportunity for growth is not the same thing as unlimited access to you. Compassion is not the same thing as ignoring patterns. And offering someone a chance to do better does not obligate you to remain if they continue to hurt you.

The point is not to assume the best of everyone forever.

The point is to gather enough information to know what you're actually dealing with.

Sometimes that information will tell you that someone is safe, trustworthy, capable of growth, and worth continuing to invest in.

Sometimes it will tell you that someone is not.

Either way, I would rather know.

Because the goal isn't to become someone who never gets hurt, or someone who never has to leave a relationship. The goal is to become someone who is willing to see what is actually in front of them, and then trust themselves enough to respond to what they see.