Yikes — I Think She Just Dissed Me
The flinch isn't consent. It's information.
You know the moment. You replay a perfectly ordinary conversation in your head ten minutes later, and something snags. A tone. A look. A compliment that, the more you turn it over, was wearing a tiny knife. And you think: “Wait. Did she just diss me?”
I had one of those moments recently. I won't give you the play-by-play — because the details don't matter, and because I suspect you already have your own version cued up. Here's the shape of it: I showed up warm. I was kind, openly, the way I like to show up. And I walked away feeling about two inches tall.
And then I did the thing we all do. I rewound the conversation. I checked my own tone for evidence. I built a case for the defense — hers, not mine. Maybe she was tired. Maybe I'd caught her at a bad moment. Maybe I'd misheard the whole exchange. I can manufacture reasonable doubt about my own experience faster than I can do almost anything else.
So I did what I do when I feel small. I reached for the wise Eleanor (Roosevelt). “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”. I've loved that line my whole life because it brings us back into our own power.
The interchange had stung, so I asked myself — did I consent? I didn't sit down and decide to feel inferior. The sting arrived before I had any say in it. My body just quietly clocked that I'd offered something generous and felt diminished in return. And then Eleanor's line, which is supposed to be a comfort, did a sneaky little thing: it handed me a second wound. Now I felt small AND like I'd failed some test of composure for feeling it at all.
Here's the REFRAME I want to offer you instead, because it's truer and a great deal kinder:
The flinch we feel is not consent. The flinch is information. It's the part of you that knows the difference between being met and being diminished, and it's doing its job. You don't owe anyone an apology for having a nervous system.
Most of us learned to override that signal early, and we learned it as a virtue. Don't make it awkward. Assume the best. They probably didn't mean it. Those are decent instincts — right up until they cost you your integrity and the ability to tell when something feels off.
Somewhere along the way, being kind and easy to be around got confused with being unbothered by passive-aggressive behavior. They are not the same skill, and only one of them is kind to you.
Name, Claim and Reframe® the Sting
NAME: Not “I'm being too sensitive,” but the real thing: I extended warmth, and it wasn't returned. That's what stung.
CLAIM: The sting is legitimate. It isn't a lapse. It's data about how you were treated.
REFRAME: You get to write the conclusion. Whether this lands as I am less-than or as Huh, she had a rough edge this morning — that verdict is yours alone.
This is where Eleanor finally gets her moment. Someone can hand you an insult, but they cannot make you keep it.
That's the reframe. Not “rise above it.” Not “you shouldn't have let her.” Just this: the sting is real, and the story you tell about your worth is still yours to author.
In practice, this takes about nine seconds, usually in a parking lot.
Ouch, that stung. Yes — because I showed up open and got my fingers slammed in the door.
That person (the disser) doesn't get to tell me what that means about me.
Then you put your car in drive and go on with your day. That's the part I want for you most — not that you rise above it, but that you don't spend the whole drive home relitigating your own worth.
So the next time you walk away from an exchange thinking, yikes — let yourself flinch. Then take the pen back.
Mid-flinch, and fine,
Andrea
Chief Reframing Officer @ Beyond the Reframe
Postscript — Small confession, because I'll always take a good true story over a tidy one: Eleanor’s words I quoted above have morphed over time. Here's what she actually said, back in 1935: “A snub is the effort of a person who feels superior to make someone else feel inferior. To do so, he has to find someone who can be made to feel inferior.”
In other words, the “disser” must find someone. Not someone who flinches — everyone flinches. Someone who agrees. That's a much smaller door, and you're the one holding it.
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I'm Andrea Mein DeWitt—author, Professional Certified Coach, and self-proclaimed warrior in recovery. After 32 years in education, I transformed my career in my early 50s and now help high achievers stop forcing their way through life and start living it. I write from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live with my husband Bill, our yellow lab Maggie, and a perfectionist inner critic I've learned to befriend (mostly)."
My book Name, Claim & Reframe: Your Path to a Well-Lived Life was featured on NBC's TODAY Show as 2023's best motivational read. The audiobook just dropped on Audible, because transformation shouldn't require sitting still.
