In modern culture, when someone thinks of great pain, they think of divorce, loss of a loved one, losing a job, money issues, family problems…
But there is another experience that can really deeply mark a person. It’s the pain you feel from losing the respect you had for someone important to you.
Losing respect for someone, be it a friend, partner, lover, boss, or co-worker, it’s actually a journey with various ups and downs, and stages.
It is always very important to divide the experience of pain into many small steps. And to understand that one process of healing pain actually involves many different stages that you should go through one by one.
So let’s try together to break down the experience of losing respect for someone you trusted.
First of all, it is about losing something that really forms the basis of every human relationship. Therefore, the depth of suffering that follows is understandable. After all, you are losing the trust in someone as a “person”, regardless of any feeling or situation. In fact, as I said, it can happen in romantic relationships, at work, and in any other type of human and situational relationship.
Before we see how the loss of respect happens, let’s look at what respect is.
The respect you give to a person comes from the way you communicate with them and from what you receive as feedback. That is, from how this person reacts to our incentives and from what they have decided to add, contribute and convey to us.
Respect is the recognition in a person of integrity, honesty, consistency, ability, and character that allows trust to take root.
To trust means to feel safe, protected, and comfortable.
Respect is “giving value,”. You value the other for who they are.
Losing respect for a person means, on a subconscious level or the level of your inner child (our most fragile and emotional part) – that you are witnessing the fall of the myth. Or, in the words of adults: you are losing an ally. It is like watching the collapse of a bridge through which only good substances, nutrients for both sides, passed.
There is non-recognition. You no longer recognize the other. What is missing is the “dialogue” you have become accustomed to. Loss of respect for a person is very close to the experience of betrayal. One of the most painful steps to overcome is the inability to recognize that person because of what has transpired, which was the complete opposite of what you until recently believed was.
And hence the feeling of sadness and grief: no matter how much you fidget, demand or scream, that person who said or did certain things no longer exists. Everything changes in just one moment. No notice, all of a sudden.
In the sense that everything you believed to be “authentic” and based on justice and integrity was in fact role-playing for other purposes, a spontaneous habit of some people to lie or simply your bad judgment.
Such an experience can cause a nervous breakdown in the worst case, and even shake the foundations of our scale of values and our reference points. With the consequences, it will have on our future relations. It is a process that probably requires the support of someone open-minded who doesn’t judge.
