We don’t always choose what comes toward us. We do choose how we meet it.
It’s easy to practice kindness when it’s welcomed and met with reciprocal kindness. What happens when it isn’t?
Kindness is easy to admire when it looks like generosity, patience, listening, helping. It’s harder when someone belittles you, provokes you, takes pot shots, or refuses to treat you respectfully.
In those moments, reacting to the other person with kindness can feel like surrender—and self-respect can feel as though it requires fighting back.
Neither is true.
A friend of mine has rarely had a positive interaction with her mother-in-law. She suspects that no woman would have been the right person for her MIL’s son to marry, but the resentment and distrust have spanned the years of the marriage.
I give my friend credit. She took a sincere look and considered that she might have done something to initiate the negative interactions. But they started on the day her husband announced their engagement—not before, and they have continued.
I have watched her try nearly every approach imaginable for dealing with her MIL’s cutting remarks, criticisms, and disdain. And she has continued the relationship because she is committed to family, but she is reaching a breaking point.
Her now older children are witnessing the way her MIL treats her, and she does not want them to grow up thinking this behavior is okay.
Not for her. Not for them. Not ever.
So, lately, she has begun asking herself a different question: Why have I permitted this treatment to go on for so long?
Being kind does not require you to keep accepting behavior that diminishes you.
Being a kind person does not require you to remain available for someone else’s unkindness.
My friend’s situation is extreme because it has lasted for years. But most of us encounter smaller versions of the same choice all the time.
Sometimes, we stay in conversations long after they have stopped being constructive.
We tolerate the colleague who belittles us and calls it humor.
The relative who takes little pot shots.
The friend who keeps crossing a line you’ve already drawn.
The meeting that is no longer constructive.
We all know the moment when this occurs in our daily interactions. A person says something designed—or simply careless enough—to diminish us.
And suddenly we’re making two decisions at once: what to do about their behavior and what kind of person we’re going to be in response.
People often stay because leaving feels rude, unkind, weak, dramatic, or somehow inconsistent with being a good person.
Treating people with respect doesn’t mean avoiding hard truths; it means addressing them while preserving the other person’s dignity and leaving room for growth.
That includes giving the other person the opportunity to change how you interact.
You don’t have to react to the first cutting remark. You can ask a question. Redirect the conversation. Remind the person what you’re trying to accomplish together.
If it happens again, you can name what you’re experiencing.
Michael, when you make little digs after I offer an idea, I become less willing to contribute. I don’t want to sit here wondering whether you think I’m stupid.
And if it continues, you can become clearer and firmer.
I’m willing to have this conversation. I’m not willing to have it the way we are having it.
The crucial point is that leaving isn’t the first step. Nor is retaliation on the agenda.
You can find a middle ground in which you give another person a reasonable opportunity to behave differently without handing them unlimited opportunities to mistreat you.
Can I remain the person I want to be while refusing to accept how you’re treating me?
You don’t have to become nasty to stop tolerating nastiness.
This is where kindness and niceness part company.
Niceness can keep you smiling, accommodating, explaining, excusing, smoothing things over—and staying too long because we don’t want to appear rude.
Kindness can be much stronger. It can say: I’ve tried to understand. I’ve told you what I’m experiencing. I’ve given you the opportunity to change how we’re interacting. I’m not going to attack you, but I’m also not going to continue this conversation.
Because unkindness carries a temptation.
It invites you to answer the cutting remark with one of your own. To embarrass the person who tried to embarrass you. To raise your voice because they raised theirs.
To become someone you don’t particularly like, or want to be, to defend yourself.
You don’t have to bow to this temptation.
You can be clear without being cruel—firm without being demeaning. You can set a boundary without anger.
Setting a boundary doesn’t require you to be angry.
Acting with kindness doesn’t require you to be submissive.
Demonstrating composure doesn’t require you to stay.
My friend hasn’t decided to end her relationship with her mother-in-law. Family still matters deeply to her. What has changed is her understanding of what that commitment requires.
She no longer believes keeping the family together means quietly putting up with whatever her mother-in-law chooses to say or do. And now that her children are old enough to see what is happening, remaining silent carries a probable cost for them, too.
She can still be respectful. She can still leave room for the relationship to improve. But she can also say, I’m not willing to be treated this way. And if the treatment continues, she can end the conversation or leave.
That isn’t abandoning her commitment to family. She has found a more honest way to live the commitment that honors her children and her needs.
Not every uncomfortable or even unkind remark requires a boundary. Sometimes you answer. Sometimes you use humor. Sometimes you correct the premise. Sometimes you let it go. Sometimes you become firmer.
And sometimes you leave.
That choice arises in marriages, families, friendships, workplaces, relationships with adult children, exchanges with neighbors, and conversations online.
Ordinary life gives us plenty of opportunities to ask: What does kindness look like when someone isn’t being kind to me? What does dignity ask of me? What does self-respect look like without retaliation?
Sometimes restoration requires two people. When you’re the only one trying, your values may eventually allow you to choose a different course.
You may leave the room.
Because you can’t always choose how another person treats you, but you get to decide who you are in the relationship.
You can refuse the invitation to become unkind.
Warmly,
Susan
Continue the Conversation
The conversation doesn’t end with these weekly essays.
Many of the ideas I explore here continue in Substack Notes—in observations, questions, and ordinary moments that sometimes become the beginning of a future essay.
I share those thoughts in Substack Notes, where readers add their own experiences and perspectives. Some of my favorite conversations happen there.
If you’d like to join me, I’d love to meet you in Notes.
A behind-the-scenes note about this week’s essay:
This essay actually began with a video about Dolly Parton supposedly responding with remarkable grace while being repeatedly belittled in an interview. It was a terrific story—and it wasn’t true.
When I went looking for the original interview, I discovered that versions of the story circulating online had either exaggerated what happened or invented it entirely. The real interviews I found were far more nuanced.
So Dolly disappeared from the essay. But the question the story raised stayed with me: How do you respond to unkindness without becoming unkind yourself?
Sometimes a bad source can still lead you to a good question. You just can’t let it become your evidence.
And this week, I’d love to know:
When someone treats you unkindly, what helps you respond in a way that still feels like you?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
This was a good read — the line between being nice and being kind resonates with me more than setting boundaries — it’s the same thing, really, but I always picture boundaries as uncrossable, and not in the case of the mother-in-law mentioned probably, but in others, the other person involved doesn’t realize how their actions and words are affecting you and possibly others, and respond when given the opportunity to do so.