Get Off the Seesaw
Going one-up and going one-down are the same game. There is a third option, and it is the whole basis of assertiveness.
You’re new at a job and it’s the holiday party. You don’t know anyone. Across the room there’s a group laughing about something, clearly delighted with each other, and nobody turns to include you.
Watch what happens next in your head, because it will almost certainly be one of two things.
One down. They obviously all know each other. I don’t belong here. I’m not the kind of person who fits into a group like that. You stay near the food. You go home and spend the drive being disappointed in yourself.
One up. You text a friend from your old job: my new coworkers are a bunch of losers. You decide they’re cliquey and shallow and you’re above the whole thing. It feels considerably better than option one, for about twenty minutes.
Here is the thing worth noticing: those are the same move. Both are you standing on a seesaw, looking for a way to establish rank. One of them just hurts less on the way down.
What the seesaw costs
The seesaw has a built-in problem. For anyone to go up, someone has to go down. It is a zero-sum device by construction, which means playing it commits you to an infinite series of comparisons that can never resolve. Somebody will always be better at something than you are. Somebody will always be worse. If your worth is set by where you land on that board, your worth never stops moving.
Going one-down has an additional cost that people underestimate. When you accept an inferior position — when someone treats you as lesser and you agree — you have left your own side. The child part of you notices. Real parents do this to real children sometimes, siding with the neighbor or the teacher or their own embarrassment instead of with their kid, and the reliable result is a person who grows up with a low ceiling on what they think they can expect from life.
Going one-up costs something too, and it is usually invisible to the person doing it. Contempt is almost always defensive. In my experience, people who need to put others down are people who are not solid, and the momentary altitude they get from it is precisely as durable as any other substitute for worth. Which is to say: not at all. They will need another hit tomorrow.
Pride and shame look like opposites. They’re the same seesaw. Drop both.
The third option
Staying peer means taking the stance that you are neither better nor worse than anyone else in ultimate value — and holding that stance regardless of what anyone else is doing.
I want to be careful about what this doesn’t mean. It doesn’t deny that hierarchies exist. Your boss outranks you at work. Someone has a better bowling average. Some people are more skilled, better trained, further along. Those are real and you can acknowledge every one of them cheerfully. Staying peer says something narrower and more radical: however society sorts us on any given variable, there is no ultimate ranking of human beings, and I am not on the board.
Now run the holiday party again from that position. You walk over and say hello. Maybe they’re delightful and you’ve found your people. Maybe they’re rude, in which case you’ve learned something useful about them in ninety seconds. Either way, you did not hand them the authority to set your value — and you communicated something specific to the part of you that was watching: we are equal to these people, so we walked over.
Their behavior, incidentally, probably had nothing to do with you. They may have been thrilled to see each other and genuinely not noticed you were there. We assume we are the subject of scenes we have merely wandered into.
How to actually do it
Two rules, and they have to operate together.
Do no harm. Don’t return the attack in kind. Don’t say things you don’t mean. And — this one is subtler — give up the fantasy that you are going to teach them something. The urge to make someone understand what they did, to correct them, to send a message, is a one-up move wearing a helpful costume. You don’t have that authority. You never did.
Protect yourself. Staying peer is not passivity. You can say please stop talking to me that way. You can leave the room. You can end a friendship. You can call for help. Protecting your inner child is never wrong, and it requires no explanation and no case file.
That combination — I respect myself and will not let you harm me, and I respect you and will not harm you — is what assertiveness actually is. Not aggression, not accommodation. Both halves at once.
A general rule I use: if someone treats me like dirt, I assume they are suffering somehow. I don’t have to let their carelessness or cruelty get inside me, and I don’t have to injure them to keep myself safe.
Judge behavior, not people
The move that makes all of this workable is separating what someone does from what someone is.
You never have to tolerate poor behavior. You can hold a person as equal in worth and still decide to spend a lot less time with them. But check your reason. If you’re withdrawing to protect yourself, good — that’s the job. If you’re withdrawing to teach them a lesson or make them feel your absence, you’ve climbed back on the seesaw with extra steps.
Brené Brown wrote something in Dare to Lead that I quote to clients constantly: “All I know is that my life is better when I assume people are doing their best.” It is a difficult assumption to make about someone who has hurt you. It’s also enormously relieving, and it has a side effect worth noticing — judging others makes it much easier to judge yourself. The two habits share a muscle. Give grace outward and you will find it easier to give inward.
One exercise
Think of someone you feel one-up about right now. Not one-down — that one you’ll find easily. One-up. The relative whose choices you find ridiculous, the coworker you privately consider mediocre, the acquaintance whose politics or parenting or life you have quietly filed under beneath me.
Got them?
Now imagine standing as a peer with that person. Not agreeing with them. Not approving of anything. Just holding, for sixty seconds, the possibility that they are worth exactly as much as you are and are doing their best with the awareness, skills, and circumstances they’ve got.
If that’s uncomfortable, that’s the point. That discomfort is the seesaw, and you can feel exactly where you were standing on it.
Nothing is more powerful than one person behaving as though we all matter. It costs nothing, it requires no one’s cooperation, and you can start in the next conversation you have.
Lori A. Strayer, M.Ed., LPC, is a licensed professional counselor and the author of Solid Inside: Cultivating Authentic Self-Worth and Lasting Inner Peace. Nothing here is a substitute for care from a licensed professional. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.
