What can we reasonably expect from each other?

Exploring lowered expectations

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what we expect from others - friends, colleagues, community members, public figures and strangers. One of the suggestions I give to people when they ask me how to navigate situations with high control, high conflict, mentally rigid people is to stop expecting those people to ever behave the way you want them to. There is no magic script or formula that will make the person who leans into their narcissistic traits suddenly capable of acting in your best interests on a consistent basis. What makes things easier is to accept them as they are, as they continue to show you how they are and adjust your expectations accordingly.

People who have a strong sense of fairness and hold high expectations of everyone react strongly to hearing this suggestion. They are constantly shocked by people’s (mis)conduct, always have an explanations for the transgressors’ poor character (ie. the decline in quality education, trauma, ideological indoctrination) and solutions to upgrade the transgressor to acceptable status. These people hold high expectations of themselves, see themselves as models of good character and lack awareness that their rigid thinking is a barrier to forming relationships necessary to enable the transformation they envision. In other words, they are the tricky people others are asking me about.

Assuming you’re not one of the people I’m describing, this advice is reserved for those people you’ve worked out are unwilling or incapable of engaging in an interaction that doesn’t involve conflict.

Personally, I don’t mind conflict. I used to hate it and avoid it as much as possible. I would dance around an issue to not upset the other person. When I eventually gained more confidence, I would try to overpower the other person with facts, rapid and louder speech. While this made me less conflict avoidant, I become more of a tyrant. Gaining confidence to defend myself while trying to salvage a relationship rupture helped me become comfortable with conflict and the necessity of conflict for realigning each party with their values, as well as the goals and purpose of the relationship. Conflict and the suffering it causes eventually intrigued me enough to train in mediation (that’s mediation, not meditation, though I’ve spent many years doing that too) and incorporate it in my interpersonal conflict analysis and narcissism hacking work.

Conflict, to me, is caused by a mismatch of expectations that were never made explicit, never negotiated and agreed on. When these unspoken (and spoken) expectations are violated, it can be experienced as a betrayal. The betrayal can ignite an inner conflict that reflects the dissonance between inner expectation of the other’s behaviour and outer reality.

Violations of our expectations influence how we respond.

Expectancy violations theory (EVT) describes how communication is an exchange of behaviours that can violate another’s expectations based on the perceptions of the exchange. This can be extended to parasocial relationships and exchanges in social media communities. The theory can make specific predictions about how a person will react to an expectation violation by either matching the violator’s unexpected behaviour or by doing the opposite of the violator’s behaviour. This theory could describe how someone who is given gentle feedback about their behaviour can react by accusing the feedback giver of being violent or when a disgraced academic insists that they’ve done nothing wrong despite evidence documenting their transgressions.

Disappointment is an emotional state that is invoked when the expected outcome doesn’t match the actual outcome. Like shame, many people can’t bear to feel disappointment so they:

• project their disappointment onto the disappointer or an unsuspecting bystander/friend/stranger.

• bypass it with a positive reframe of the situation (“It wasn’t meant to be.” “Something better is going to come along for me.”).

• feel righteous anger that fuels efforts to expose the expectation violator.

• turn the anger onto themselves for being so stupid to expect the desired outcome.

• numb themselves and vow to lower expectations of everyone to avoid disappointment.

I’m sure you can think of other reactions (comment below). I’ve had and still have these reactions when my expectations of another is violated as I imagine you do too.

For example, you would expect that a cease fire means that each party in conflict won’t attack the other, or that an Ivy league president would have the academic integrity worthy of their position, or a medical professional wouldn’t abuse or kill their patients. While these are reasonable expectations, it seems naive today to hold unwavering expectations when reality keeps showing us something different.

One of the things that has given me a sense of peace over the years is to accept people and situations as they are before I make my next move. It doesn’t mean I become so emotionally detached that I numb myself to the pain of disappointment. I get to grapple with the inner conflict that disappointment exposes, try to make sense of the situation and reckon with the impact as I move toward accepting the reality of the situation.

Once I can accept reality, I have more options of how I will manage the issue compared to the reactions I described above. One of those options will inevitably be to adjust my expectations and the standards that I hold. If the situation involves someone I interact with on a regular basis, changing my standards will influence the extent of my engagement with that person.

I also recognise that this approach might not be appropriate for situations that involve people who wield power over policies, institutional practices and have a large influence over others. I can accept their conduct, blame the corrupt system and move on as I see many people do but that changes nothing. The actions or inactions of people in those powerful positions stand to hurt many people, including ourselves, or contribute to the moral decay of society and institutional distrust.

Lowering expectations of people and groups who violate norms and expectations - standards - necessary for sustaining a functioning society is reckless. Similarly, lowering expectations of certain groups of people to meet a standard that has not been demonstrated to contribute to beneficial outcomes for most people is also reckless (and racist), as it undermines the standards that are evidenced to enable the beneficial outcomes that sustain a community, institution or society.

Therein lies a dilemma. How do we accept reality as is, such as people can be corrupt, ignorant, abusers of power, homicidal, traumatized, entitled etc., without lowering expectations of others just to avoid disappointment or to strive to attain a fantasy reality?

This is more ambitious question - how do we restore standards (ie trustworthiness, integrity, honesty, respect of differences, consideration etc) once held to each other and to institutions that have been progressively eroded and distorted through narcissism, power tripping, deception and ideological capture?

What does it ask of each of us to live up to those expectations of each other?

I’d love to know what you think, feel and do about this topic and questions.

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, subscribing and supporting my work,

Nathalie Martinek, PhD

The Narcissism Hacker

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Hack narcissism and support my work

I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

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