When Being an Outcast Makes You Tolerate Disrespect Just to Have “Friends”

Written By Caroline Smith

If you have felt like an outcast for a large portion of your life and you’ve gone a long time without relationships like friends, romantic interests, acquaintances, etc., you might become desperate for the wrong type of attention just for the sake of having someone in your life — even if those people is not a great person.

You start to tolerate things like passive aggressive behavior, straight up mean behavior, and overall disrespect because you think you can’t find anyone else. You don’t think there are people in the world who would actually respect you and like hanging out with you.

That is not way to approach relationships. When you have enough self-worth, you won’t feel like you have to tolerate that kind of behavior, because you have confidence that you can and will find your people.

Join me in this week’s discussion about what it means to build up your self-worth and stop accepting less than what any human deserves in healthy friendships, relationships, and otherwise!

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Transcript

Hello to all of you who are tuning into this episode of the introverted misfit podcast. If we haven’t met before, my name is Caroline Smith, a.k.a., The Introverted Misfit, and I am the “misfit” behind the brand. I am a social confidence coach for introverts who find socializing to be tricky and nerve-wracking, and want to change that without acting extroverted or being socially perfect.

I recently realized that as my podcast audience is growing slowly but surely, I don’t usually start off my podcasts by telling people exactly what it is that I do, so I just wanted to explain that for those of you who are new here.

You know, a while ago — about 8 months ago — I hosted a workshop called Dating With Confidence for Quiet, Quirky Women.

It was tailored for late-bloomers who were late to the dating game because of their social fears and social difficulties — whether that means shy, socially anxious, socially awkward, or on the spectrum like myself.

The main topic of discussion in that workshop was really focusing on the basic social skills needed to get a man’s attention, how to tell if he’s interested in you, and how to show him you’re interested, because of course, I am not a dating and relationship coach — I’m a social confidence coach.

But another portion of the workshop focused on some of the more deeper topics related to dating and finding love, including feeling so unlovable that you become desperate for just any kind of attention from a man.

Like, a man who doesn’t like you that much but he’s pretending like he does so he can get what he wants from you, he’s really disrespectful, he’s inconsiderate, etc., etc., etc.

He’s just not the kind of man that you want to involve yourself with. This is the type of man who is going to ruin your mental health if you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. OK?

Well, for the most part, that same concept is true for other types of relationships: platonic, professional, familial, etc.

The common theme is you are willing to accept poor behavior from people in your life because you just want them to stick around; you don’t want to feel abandoned again if this relationship doesn’t work out.

So when you do finally find people who you think are your friends, but then it turns out they’re not great friends, you might be more willing to stick around because you feel like you can’t find any other friends.

These are the type of friends who are constantly sneak dissing you, excluding you from hanging out with the rest of them, being kind of cold towards you when you come around, maybe they poke fun at you a lot and they try to excuse it by saying, “It’s just a joke,” or even just keeping you around because they know they can use you when it’s convenient for them; they know when they say jump, you’ll say, “How high?” with no questions.

If you are one of my fellow spectrum listeners, there’s an extra layer to this because there are some scenarios in which you’re having to decipher people’s behavior and intentions so you can figure out if they’re being nice or being mean. That in itself is a lifelong journey.

And as a fairly new entrepreneur myself, I’m learning that professional connections can turn out that way, too.

You’ll encounter people who want access to your platform and the things you have to offer them professionally, but if you ask them for something in return, it’s crickets. They don’t really want to help you out for whatever reason.

Or, you’ll encounter people who behave really unprofessionally, but they’ll still accept any help they can receive from you on the backend.

I don’t want to go off on too many tangents right now, but hopefully you get the picture. This is a human behavior that can and will happen in every sector of life where people are involved.

I’ve told this story before, but when I was in middle school, I found myself surrounded by a lot of popular kids just by way of the classes and extracurricular activities I was in.

The cross-country team, a club called “Discovery Kids,” the tennis team, and of course I have to state the obvious: most of these activities and classes were predominately white, which just contributed even more to my feeling like an “other” at that stage in my life.

That’s not a problem for me now that I’m an adult and I’ve got my own sense of self-confidence and self-esteem, but you know how these things are when you’re a kid and your brain is still developing. And then being an undiagnosed autistic child on top of that just added to all of my mental angst.

So anyway, I’m surrounded by all of these popular kids, and so what do I do? I try to fit in with them. I try to get their attention, join their conversations, talk like them, do their mannerisms.

And then, they reject me. But, because I’m desperate for just someone to talk to me, I keep trying, even though some of them just told me straight up, “You’re weird. Can you stop talking to us?”

And a similar thing happened to me in high school, where I would hang out with people who I thought were my friends, and then they would lowkey bully me in front of other people.

I remember this one time my band class travelled to San Antonio, TX for a trip, and one day, I wore a new hairstyle that I quite liked, and someone said I looked like a man in front of like 10 other people, and I let it slide.

Then, that same person thought it would be funny to say a very racist joke towards me. We had gone to see a rodeo type of show where this man was showing off some cool tricks with a whip and a lasso, and the guy says to me, “Hey, Caroline, shouldn’t you be out there in front of the whip?”

And of course, like the quiet, docile girl that I was, I didn’t say anything and continued to be nice to him for the remainder of my time in that high school. Why? Because I didn’t have any friends, and so every time he felt like coming back around and being nice to me for whatever reason, I would be nice right back to him.

I just want to slap some sense into that past version of myself, because there is no way in the world I would just sit by and let someone talk to me like that — no matter what race they are.

And then, I had my share of run ins with the other black kids in my school.

We had some pretty major cultural differences that got in the way of us understanding each other.

To make a long story short, I acted “too white” to be considered one of them: I talked too white, I dressed too white, I did too well in school, I was too smart (which, hello, major internalized racism there when you thing black people aren’t capable of being smart, but again, I don’t want to go off on that tangent), my family acted too white, etc.

And so sometimes, I would find myself trying to change my behavior to be more acceptable to them: I would try to talk more like them, I would try to pretend like I knew what they were talking about even when I didn’t at all, and I was just losing myself trying to fit in with people who didn’t want me around. And as you can probably guess, that behavior just got me laughed at more and rejected even more.

If you are listening to this episode, you can probably relate to at least one of the scenarios I just described, whether it’s an exact match or just conceptually similar to that idea of seeking the wrong type of attention and accepting disrespectful behavior because you just want someone to be in your life.

So, the rest of this episode is going to explore the single primary way you can stop seeking validation from people who do not mean you well, and start attracting the kind of people into your life who respect you and actually like being around you — imagine that!

The answer: Self-worth.

What is this single primary way I’m going to talk about?

It’s that “S” word that you probably hear a lot about in online spaces nowadays: Self-worth.

Or should I say, a healthy sense of self-worth, because I’ve certainly met people who have an inflated sense of self-worth, which is not fun for anyone involved.

Self-worth is the belief that you have inherent value as a person, and the acknowledgement that you are worthy of love, respect, and belonging just because you are human — no matter your race, religion, achievements, failures, social status, economic standing, etc.

In the context of this conversation, it means you are not willing to accept poor treatment from others just because you really want them to like you, or be your friend, or date you, or be in your life in any capacity.

It means you have enough self-worth to speak up for yourself when you feel like you’re being picked at or thrown under the bus, or it could mean you have enough self-respect to just walk away without even saying a word. I’ve been in situations like that, too, where the disrespect was just wayyyyy too prevalent and consistent that it wasn’t even worth a conversation. I literally just removed those people from my space in every since of the word and never looked back.

That is the power of having a healthy sense of self-worth and knowing how to act on it.

Your life is going to change. The types of people you attract into your life are going to change. Your dating life is going to change if you’re in that stage of life right now. Your current relationships are going to change — they’re either going to get better for you, or they will cease to exist because some people don’t like the fact that you finally have boundaries and standards for your relationships.

So now, how do you get there? How do you get to that point of having a sense of self-worth?

Well, I won’t lie to you. It’s a journey, and I don’t know if it’s ever really completely done until you’re dead and gone, honestly.

It’s a journey to retrain your brain in this way when you’re so used to not having self-worth and letting people walk all over you.

But it’s a journey that is well worth taking for all of the reasons that I just talked in-depth about.

If this journey is something you are ready to embark on as far as your self—confidence and social confidence goes, I’d love to help you with that.

Like I said in the intro of this episode, I am a social confidence coach for introverts who feel like social misfits and want to become more socially confident without acting extroverted or being socially perfect.

That’s what I help people do in my private 1-on-1 coaching, and building your sense of self-worth just as I talked about in this episode is woven into all of the work I do. It’s part of having confidence of any kind, including social confidence.

If that sounds like something you need in your life right now, I would love to talk more about how I can help you along your social confidence journey. So, if you’re interested, you can book a free Connection Call with me using the link in my bio or if you want to read more about my 1-on-1 program, Communicate With Quiet, Quirky Confidence, you can go to theintrovertedmisfit.com/coaching and learn more about it, and then you can book a free call with me from that page, too.

As usual, every link that I mention in this episode will be in the description.

That’s all for today’s episode.

As always, if you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment whether you’re tuning in on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, and share this podcast with a friend. Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline, the founder of The Introverted Misfit, is dedicated to helping shy, awkward introverts become socially confident — without acting extroverted!

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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