Three days on, you are still going over the argument in your head, even though you won it. That is the confusing part.
It started over the route. Not even the route — over whether the road you took was actually faster, which neither of you could have proved sitting in that car. Somewhere in the third exchange it stopped being about the road. You could hear it stop. Your voice changed before your argument did, and so did theirs, and then it was ten minutes of two people who were no longer discussing traffic.
In the end, they backed down. Fine, they said. You were right. You won — and days later you are not a bit happier for it.
You weren’t having a conversation. You were settling who ranks higher.
The reason winning doesn’t make you any happier is simple enough. It wasn’t a conversation.
In an argument like that, the same few questions are always being asked, though nobody says them out loud. Are you stronger than me? Are you better than me?
The words on the surface are about the route. Underneath, each person is trying to establish who is more competent and whose judgment should dominate. So even when the argument is over, nothing has really been gained. The only thing it decided was who came out on top.
This is also why winning brings no lasting relief. If your sense of your own worth depends on being above the other person, one win cannot settle it. The next disagreement puts your place above them at risk again, so the same contest comes back over some other topic. The argument about the road ended. Your doubt about your own worth did not.
What it costs, day to day
Once ranking yourself against others becomes a habit, you meet people first as rivals to compete with, not as people to be considerate of. Two things then get difficult, and they are the two things relationships are actually made of.
The first is respect. Someone sits down across from you and, before either of you has said a word, you have already sized him up. Is he above me or below me? Does he know more? Has he done more? You do not decide to do this. It happens on its own, the way a first impression does, and it shapes how you hear everything he says after. If he comes out above you, you find yourself disagreeing with him before you have even worked out whether you do. If he comes out below you, you expect him to keep quiet and listen to you. Either way, you are no longer listening to what he actually says.
The second is consideration. Consideration means stepping for a moment into the other person’s position and seeing things from there. If you are always measuring who is above whom, you never have that moment to spare: every exchange is already being used to settle it one more time. A colleague mentions she is struggling with something, and what comes up in you first is not that sounds hard. It is a small relief you would rather not feel: she admitted to struggling and you did not, so for now you are the one above.
If someone described all this to you out loud, you would not defend it. That is not the same as being able to stop it.
Where do you learn it?
Not in any lesson. Nobody teaches it; you pick it up by having it done to you.
As a child, you said no, and an adult overrode you anyway, with a louder voice and the authority to make it stick. Not by persuasion — you were not persuaded, and you did not come around. You were simply the smaller party. That is not being treated as a person. That is being overpowered.
When this happens not once or twice but all through childhood, the child comes to a conclusion about what relationships are: a way of deciding who is on top. Every disagreement ended with the stronger person winning, and the child never saw one settled any other way. Children cannot invent a way they have never seen.
Later, when that child has power of their own, they reach for the same method: press harder, speak louder, or refuse to stop until the other person gives in. They do not need to be out for revenge to do this. It is simply the only way they were ever shown.
The parent on the receiving end of a child’s no
When a small child first starts to show who they are, the word they reach for first is no. Saying no is how a child begins to become a person separate from their parents. It is healthy, not disrespectful. What I want to look at here is the parent who hears it.
Some parents cannot take it. As I see it, a parent like that is weak on the inside: weak enough that a small child’s no feels like an attack.
Look at the difference between what the word means and how it is heard. The child says no, and what that means is that she is finding out she can want something you do not want and still be your child. That is not remotely how it sounds to you, the parent. It sounds like defiance. It sounds like being talked down to by someone who comes up to your hip and who would not survive a week without you. And on a bad evening, it arrives as the fourth thing that has gone against you since six o’clock.
The child’s refusal stings the parent’s pride. A parent who hears disagreement as a blow to their authority or their worth cannot simply let the sting pass. So the parent overpowers the child to feel strong again, and wins, because the parent controls the rules, the resources and the consequences.
But I have never once seen a parent who pushes a child down like that end up happy.
Some children grow up the opposite way
Not every child whose no was overridden grows up to push others. Some go quiet instead, and stop speaking up for themselves.
They are not people who never learned to draw a line. They did draw one, by saying no, and were punished for it.
What goes wrong for them is small and very specific. Someone like this knows exactly what she does not want, immediately and without any doubt. The trouble is saying it. The sentence is ready; it gets as far as the back of her teeth and does not come out. Afterward she can tell you word for word what she meant to say. She has been saying it over to herself ever since.
Shut a child’s no down enough times and the humiliation of it hardens and settles in. Shame, we call it. And shame comes down in the end to a single sentence.
There is nothing in me worth anything.
When saying no brings ridicule, punishment or withdrawal of love again and again, the child comes to feel that showing what she wants means being humiliated. Later she may know exactly what she wants and still say nothing, because the moment a disagreement begins, her body expects what used to happen next.
Both began with a child’s no that was overridden
The person who has to win, and the person who can’t get the sentence out. They look like they have nothing to do with each other.
In both cases, a child said no and was overpowered. One took on the stronger person’s way of doing things and, once grown, overpowers others in arguments too. The other learned that speaking up is dangerous and keeps the argument inside her own head. They behave in opposite ways as adults, but they started in the same place: a no that was not accepted.
What to do when a child refuses everything, constantly, is a separate question, and I am not answering it here. Only this: when a parent pushes a child down because their pride is hurt, that is not treating the child as a person. It is simply overpowering her, and what she learns from it is that the stronger one wins. Taking a child’s no seriously does not mean she always gets her way. A parent can say, “You don’t have to like it, but you do need a bath tonight.” The feeling is accepted, and the limit still holds. A child whose no was taken seriously like this does not grow up needing to win every conversation, because for her a conversation was never where it got decided who is on top.
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board