I had been waiting twenty minutes when the waiter came over, apologetic, to tell me the dish I’d ordered was no longer available and would I choose again.
I should have been told at the time of ordering. We were hungry. And instead of simply picking something else, I took the opportunity to tell him it wasn’t good enough and that I expected better.
He couldn’t have been more apologetic. Eventually, with a shake of my head, I chose again and off he went. I sat there feeling perfectly justified for about four minutes.
What I Called It, and What It Was
This wasn’t unusual for me. When I thought someone was being incompetent, I could become impatient and sometimes I would express that impatience quite sharply. I never felt good about it afterwards. For years, I thought it was arrogance. I had spoken to someone who was not really in a position to answer back, in a way I would never have spoken to a friend. I was not proud of it, and arrogance seemed like the right word.
It took me a long time to realise that something else was going on. Underneath the impatience, I did not actually believe I was better than the other person. What I was feeling was that I was not being listened to, that my needs did not matter, or that I was somehow being disregarded. I was taking the mistake personally, as though it said something about my worth.
Of course, that did not make my reaction acceptable. But it did help me understand it. I had been judging myself for being arrogant when, in reality, I was reacting from an old sense of not being good enough. The behaviour could look exactly the same from the outside, but the belief driving it was very different.
For years, I had the reaction, regretted it and promised myself I would do better next time. What I had not done was question what I was believing in the moment. Once I began to see that, I had something I could actually work with.
What Surprised Me Most
I’d assumed that examining this properly would make me think worse of myself. That’s precisely why I left it alone so long, and I suspect that expectation is what stops most people looking.
It did the reverse. What I found was not a woman who thought she was better than a waiter, but a much younger version of me who had concluded, on reasonable evidence at the time, that she didn’t count for very much, and who was still, decades later, quietly checking. That’s a sadder thing to know. It is also immeasurably kinder. You can’t be ashamed of a child for drawing a sensible conclusion from the information she had.
Self-awareness has a reputation for being an exercise in finding fault with yourself. In my experience it’s closer to the opposite. Almost every pattern I’ve looked at closely turned out to be less damning than the story I’d been telling myself about it.
The Person Who Showed Me
My son responds to these situations in a way I never have, and watching him was what finally made my own pattern visible. When things go wrong, he reassures people that these things happen and helps them find a way through. It costs him nothing.
What I noticed was that he had no edge, and no impulse to make someone else’s day harder because his own had been inconvenienced.
I had needed to see someone do it differently, right in front of me, before I could see myself at all. Left to myself, I’d have gone on believing I simply had high standards.
Three Kinds of Reaction
The restaurant incident was not typical of how I behaved. Most days I was perfectly civil, and nobody would have guessed what was going on underneath. That is what I find so interesting now. These reactions had been happening for decades, yet I had never really examined them. Neither had anyone who knew me well. How could I have missed something that was happening inside me?
I think part of the answer is that our reactions are not always obvious. Some are easy to recognise, while others can go unnoticed for years.
The reactions that show. These are the sharp replies, the impatient tone or the things we say that we later regret. Other people may point them out to us, which makes them easier to recognise. For many of us, though, these are only a small part of what is going on.
The reactions we try to hide. We may say the right thing and behave politely, while underneath we are feeling angry, hurt or resentful. We might think we have concealed it, but other people can often sense that something is wrong. Because nothing has been said openly, however, it may never be discussed.
The reactions nobody sees. These are the conversations we replay in our minds, the judgements we never express, the irritation we swallow or the disappointment we feel when something we hoped for does not happen. Sometimes we are so used to these reactions that we barely notice them ourselves.
I suspect much of our inner life falls into that last group. We can appear to be getting on with life perfectly well while our thoughts and feelings are quietly shaping how we experience it. Unless we begin to pay attention, we may never realise how much is happening beneath the surface.
Where Yours Might Have Come From
Every family has its rules, and the unspoken ones are the most powerful. They do a real job at the time. The trouble is that nobody sends word when circumstances have moved on, and a child who learned early that she didn’t matter very much becomes a woman who hears a late order as a verdict.
You may recognise one of these:
- You can’t let a mistake go by without mentioning it.
- You go quiet rather than risk a disagreement.
- You say yes, and resent it afterwards.
- You hear a suggestion as criticism.
- You can’t accept help without feeling slightly diminished.
- A small setback arrives feeling like evidence of something much larger.
Any of those may once have been a sensible strategy. They are not personality flaws; they are intelligent adaptations that have outlived their usefulness.
Not All of It Hurts
It would be easy to read this far and think that all of our programming is something we need to get rid of. But that is not the case. Some of the qualities we value most in ourselves may have developed from the very experiences that also created our difficulties.
I am a solution finder. I rarely sit with a problem for long, which people around me sometimes find a little disconcerting. I learned to find solutions because, growing up, I believed nobody else was going to do it for me. That belief also contributed to my sense that I did not matter very much. The same experience gave me both a strength and a difficulty.
My independence developed similarly. My parents took very little interest in the details of my life, and one result was that very little was imposed on me. I was free to form my own opinions and make my own choices. Some of those choices took me down poor paths, and I probably learned from my mistakes more often than I needed to. But I also developed an independence that I value enormously.
The point is not that we need to reject everything we learned growing up. It is that we can begin to understand where our patterns came from and decide which ones we want to keep. I do not want to stop being a solution finder or become less independent. I simply want to recognise when those qualities are being driven by an old belief that no longer serves me.
The same may be true of your best qualities. You learned them through your experiences, and over time they became part of who you are. You can value those qualities while still questioning the beliefs that helped create them.
Learned Means It Can Be Looked At
What was learned can be looked at, and looking is enough to open a small gap between the trigger and the response. But you can’t see a programme clearly while you’re the one running it. So where, exactly, would you have to stand?
we can begin to understand where our patterns came from and decide which ones we want to keep
Try This: The Reaction Nobody Saw
This week, notice one reaction that nobody else saw. Not the ones that showed. Those are easy, and they aren’t where most of your life is happening. Look for the one that stayed inside, and write down three things:
- What happened.
- What you felt, and how strongly.
- What you did on the outside instead.
Then leave it alone. Don’t analyse it, and don’t rush to name it. If my experience is anything to go by, the first label you reach for will be the harshest one available, and there’s a decent chance it’s wrong.
You are not looking for a fault. You’re looking for something interesting.
Next, we will look at how these patterns, and the beliefs they come from, shape our experience.
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