How Do I Step Back When Someone Isn't on My Side?
Why noticing that someone isn't on your side isn't disloyal, and what to do once you have.
You can usually tell when someone isn’t quite on your side. They’re pleasant enough, but you can feel that they want something from you, or that they’re steering things toward what suits them. And often, the moment you notice it, you go along anyway. You stay agreeable and keep cooperating, as if you hadn’t noticed at all.
That small moment points to something that turns out to be foundational. Inside your own mind, you always have the capacity to step back: to observe what’s happening, to weigh it against what you care about, and to choose how you want to respond, rather than being carried along by whatever the other person wants. It sounds simple. For many people it isn’t, because somewhere along the way they came to feel they don’t have the right to it.
Part of what makes the step back possible is empathy, which we usually think of as feeling with another person. Empathy does something else as well: it lets us sense what someone is after, their intentions, and not only their feelings. Sometimes, when you tune in honestly, you discern that a person is relating to you mainly as a means to their own ends. Seeing that clearly is not cynicism, and it is not unkind. It is simply declining to look away from what is actually there.
The freedom to step back and take this kind of private measure is a foundation of autonomy. And many people, often women in particular, were raised to feel they don’t have it, that they should stay agreeable, available, and merged, and that holding a separate inner vantage point is a kind of betrayal. It isn’t.
You always have the right to step back inside your own mind and take your own measure of what’s happening. You don’t have to announce it, and you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission.
This inner step back is not coldness, and it is not the end of closeness. It’s actually what lets closeness be something you choose rather than something that happens to you. Learning to do it steadily, without losing your warmth, is much of what we work on in my Strong Heart program.
In the rest of this article, I’ll walk through how to make that inner step back in the moment, and then the three things it opens up: seeing clearly what’s actually going on, weighing it against what you value, and deciding what, if anything, to do.
