We tend to rise to the level of someone’s kind or unkind treatment towards us. If we’re treated with kindness, respect, and even understanding, we feel valuable and esteemed as though we have support for being our best to ourselves, to them, and in the world.
Conversely, if we’re treated with disrespect, failing to be listened to or understood, then we feel unimportant and unvaluable as though we aren’t worth someone’s effort to treat us well. And so we are involved in recovery, trying to regain our confidence, perhaps feeling low and ashamed because we weren’t treated well.
How can you receive the treatment you most want, need, and deserve?
- Recognize your need for being treated with respect, to be spoken to in respectful language and tone and especially when there’s conflict.
- Speak up and lovingly inform someone when you feel that you aren’t being treated well. Let them know how you want to be treated. Use words like respect or kindness, honesty or fairness. This isn’t you being controlling or dominating another. This is you learning to validate your feelings and speaking up about them. By setting a kind tone you also invite a kind response.
- Set a boundary for yourself so that if and when you don’t feel you’re being treated with kindness and respect, you will need to do one of two things: One, you’ll let them know and do it respectfully in a kind tone. And two, if they don’t awaken or care to change their treatment of you, you will give yourself permission to quietly excuse yourself. That’s because you know you’re worth being treated well. And also because you deserve to provide for yourself a place of refuge from affliction. That isn’t you huffing off in a fit of rage. That’s you, behaving with quiet dignity, collecting yourself, and appropriately showing self-respect.
- Finally, now that you have become more sensitive to how you want to be treated and you are able to set a boundary around it, look for those people who are both capable and reliable about their consistent good treatment towards you. And surround yourself with only those people. It’s hard enough to be consistent in our own behavior or to expect others to do so. But if, at least, everyone you’re in contact with, is trying to do this, then you and your friends can make beautiful music together! And it’s a better world!
