Dear Christina:

You wrote about the teacher: “what can she do? Make a face every time they laugh?”-

– no, she can take them aside and tell them in no uncertain terms that she will not tolerate their behavior, that they must treat everyone in the class respectfully and if not, they are not welcome to her class!

You wrote that it is the only studio in town, this means that these girls will be motivated to stay in class and treat you respectfully so to not be kicked out of the class, don’t you think?

anita

Hi Christina,

I struggle with this too. The feeling of being judged and disrespected hurts.

But often times the context matters. If they were people that you had to have a working relationship with – like family, friends or colleagues – then asserting yourself or taking action would be productive as you need to ensure that you are not losing out because of a false perception they might have of you, having wrongly judged you. That is not the case here. These kids’ lack of respect does not harm you except emotionally and I would like to explore why with you.

I read this somewhere and it might help you like it did for me. If you were walking on the street and you bumped into someone accidentally thereby angering them and that person yells at you “you don’t have arms”, when in fact you do, you would simply walk away but if the same person yells “you are a (insert expletive here)” you would want to hit back. Why is that? When it comes to people saying hurtful things often we do not even bother validating if it is true, we are hurt by what we interpret to be their intention and if they have succeeded with it.

If the same girls respectfully shared with you what they thought you were doing wrong, you would not mind it. It is not the defect of the skill here that is hurting you it is their reaction to it and how you interpret it.What oftens goes through my mind is “how dare they not respect me, do they not realize how wrong that is, if I yell back at them and call them out that will do it”. But what am i trying to achieve there? Show them they are wrong, wrong that they think I don’t need respect. That they ought to give me respect? When i know I have an arm, do I need to assert it? When know i am worthy of respect do I need to assert it? What will I lose if this one person does not think I deserve respect? I could confront them but why am I so upset? Who is this person to me anyways?

This may sound weird, but I caught myself thinking this so i am sharing that as well – if  I was the President of my country and i really wanted to be perfect at ballet, would a bunch of kids laughing at me hurt me? I would just think “oh these immature kids – they need to grow up, they have a lot to learn” and move on. There might be a correlation between how much other people affect us and our sense of self worth.

gj