An introduction to contempt
I have been notoriously bad at dealing with contempt.
When I look back in my life at all the moments my relationships fell apart - those moments where I felt deep anger towards higher ups, or when I was so indignant I wanted to scream into the abyss -there was always contempt involved.
I don't think I'm alone, either: in all my years coaching and, more broadly speaking, observing interpersonal dynamics between humans, one of the greatest relationship killers I've seen across multiple industries, verticals, and relationships of all types is contempt and resentment. If you’re not familiar with The Gottman Institute’s Four Horsemen, you’ll see that the four horsemen that indicate the end of relationships with astonishingly high accuracy are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Though Gottman specializes in romantic relationships between two partners, it makes sense that these are also the relationship killers at work.
Out of the Four Horsemen, contempt consistently seems to be the hardest one for people to understand. Everyone knows what it’s like to get criticized. Everyone can remember a time they reacted defensively towards someone else. Everyone can remember a time they withdrew and ignored someone (or got ignored by someone else.)
But what does contempt really mean, and how does it feel to receive it, and to give it?
Contempt develops when feelings aren’t openly expressed, and grievances aren’t properly and healthily aired out in a constructive manner. It also happens when we fail to appreciate our partners.
The most dangerous part of contempt is it isn’t one giant event that leads to it. It’s the death of a thousand paper cuts, each cut made by the thing you, or they, didn’t want to talk about.
From getting served divorce papers, to breaking up with your cofounder, to hating the guts of someone on your leadership team - recognizing and dealing with contempt is surprisingly one of the lowest hanging fruit to prevent all of these worst-case scenarios. This write-up will give you exactly the tools you need to prevent the worst fallouts and pivot from contempt killing your relationships, to you killing your contempt instead.
How to identify contempt
To cure contempt, you have to recognize it first. Here are some phrases that I think represent contempt well:
- Does he even try? It’s like he just doesn’t care.
- She’s so clueless, it’s embarrassing to watch.
- Why am I the only one who has to clean up her messes?
- He acts like he’s better than everyone else, but he’s not.
- How can someone be so useless and still think they’re important?
- She’s all talk, no action. And it’s always been that way.
- I don’t know why anyone would tolerate him. He’s insufferable.
This is a Formula that I've come up with to illustrate how contempt shows up:
In the above equation, you start by making an observation of the other person. From there, you make a negative judgment call that the person is bad (or dumb, or clueless, or useless - you get the picture.)
You then make an assumption of the other person’s intentions, that you can’t know for sure. For example, you might assume the person thinks they’re self-absorbed, but unless that person has said, “Yes, I’m self-absorbed,” it’s still an assumption. Or, you might think, “That person is such a cocky, arrogant bastard!” and in reality, the person might actually struggle with deeply-sowed insecurity, and this is their way of coping with it. You just don’t know. You assume.
Then, there’s some version of victimhood - if you’re not familiar with The Drama Triangle, this is where someone plays the role of victim, villain, and hero. In this scenario, you may be the victim and the other person is a villain, or you are the hero and they are the victim.
You might think you’re a victim if you throw yourself a pity party and lament how much extra work the other person is causing you as the villain. Or, you might think of yourself as a hero if you see the other person as a victim in need of saving because they are “just so damn incompetent.” Of course, you might tell yourself a story that the other person is turning you into the villain ("They are so sensitive and incompetent, of course they make me out to be the bad guy!")
Either way - The Drama Triangle leads to contempt and a resentment end state.
And that resentment starts the whole cycle all over again. But this time, there is even more rigidity in believing your judgments about the other person are always correct.
Hopefully, you now know how to identify contempt. This is the first step, and it's often the hardest. You can't do anything to handle your contempt if you don't recognize that it exists. And now, you understand how destructive it is.
💡 Here's an exercise I recommend trying out: see if you can think back to one or two relationships in your personal or work life that ended poorly. Can you spot the contempt showing up on your side? What about on their side? Can you identify the observation, judgment, assumption, victimhood, and resentment stages?
The antidote: Appreciation and assuming good intentions.
If contempt begins through observation and judgment, the antidote is to challenge that judgment and, more importantly, your assumptions. There are two methods I like using to make this happen.
Humans have a natural bias towards focusing on what isn’t working - it’s evolutionary. Back in the day, you were dead if you didn’t pay attention to the bad stuff, like the saber-toothed tiger. But this is less helpful in today’s modern world, which is much more complex and which requires a lot more collaboration on a more frequent basis between lots of people.
So the solution is to magnify the good.
The Gottman Institute’s research has found that there’s a magic ratio of 5-to-1: that is, stable and happy relationships have five or more positive interactions for every negative one. Additionally, this study on relationship satisfaction found similar conclusions that giving and receiving affectionate communication positively predicted relationship satisfaction.
Though the studies above are focused on relationships between romantic partners, I’ve found that the principles can be well-applied to working relationships, too. The best relationships between execs and operators form when there are more positive interactions than negative ones, and when there are multiple avenues to magnify the good. It doesn’t have to be rigid, but you could implement gratitude practices in your 1-1s, daily standups, or even create an appreciation Slack channel to call out the good.
The second solution is to assume positive intent and give benefit of the doubt.
I have flashbacks to high school when I think about positive intent. As teenagers, our brains - specifically the prefrontal cortex - aren’t fully formed yet, so we make many of our assumptions with help from our lizard brain, the amygdala. The amygdala is the one that told you everyone in high school was gossiping about you, that you were the center of every conversation, that the people whispering down the hallways must all be talking about you...talk about paranoia!
Up until my late twenties, I was not good at assuming positive intent, and I can almost guarantee that neither were you at some point. Because our brains don’t fully form until we’re twenty five years old - some of us later than that - we just haven’t had much practice shifting out of the amygdala and into the prefrontal cortex, which is the part that’s able to say, “Wait a minute - is this assumption correct?” So it's no wonder we jump to conclusions, get paranoid and defensive, and stick up every layer of protection we can build in front of us. That's what we've practiced for majority of our life; it's the default neural pathway.
But here's the good news: this research study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who err on the side of positive perceptions experience higher relationship satisfaction, and buffer against conflicts and challenges over time. Remember the saber-toothed tiger we talked about earlier? While I’m obviously not advocating for delusional takes on relationships that aren’t working, it’s not surprising that our inclinations are to initially assume the worst in people around us. And we can practice this, to form new neural pathways and override the previous one.
Here are some tactics you can use to practice assuming positive intent and giving benefit of the doubt, to avoid contempt from building up:
- Don’t react. Pause, then respond.
When I was a piano teacher, I remember frequently feeling stressed about everything, from the families I worked with, to my landlords who seemed to have a vendetta out for me, to my staff and their many different personalities. It was during that time that I got one of the best pieces of advice from a student’s father, who was one of the first engineers at Hyperloop. He wisely advised me, “Don’t react, Regina - respond.”
When you react, you allow your impulses to govern your actions. When you respond, you allow your prefrontal cortex time to catch up and help you remove any emotional biases before you act.
After Kaveh gave me that example, I started paying attention to when I would react (which was often), and what the results were when I did (which were often bad.) Then, I started inserting pauses in my reaction, turning my reaction into a response (which was tough but worth the practice), and what the results were when I did (which were often better decisions.)
There’s a wonderful meditation I love, called See, Hear, Feel by Shinzen Young, that teaches you to add in the pause. It takes about 10 minutes to practice daily. I highly recommend it to all of my coachees, and I recommend it to you. The best part of Shinzen's practice is that you can do it with your eyes open. We often practice meditation with our eyes closed, but this is less helpful in every day context, because when you're ready to roll down your window and flip off the incompetent driver that cut you off, you didn't exactly have 10-15 minutes to get into a Zen-like state to respond. Meditating with your eyes open teaches you to switch into a mindful headspace in a more typical state - where your eyes are open. - Practice cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to activate your TPN.
CBT is one of those powerful tools that change your life once you discover it. It simply asks you to consider alternative explanations, and reframes your potential conflict into a place of curiosity.
Your brain has two really important networks: the Default Mode Network (DMN), which is always in idle mode and happens when you’re reflecting on yourself or thinking about the past and future, and Task-Positive Network (TPN), which is your “get stuff done” mode. Practicing CBT is an active shift out of DMN (which causes you to ruminate on worst-case scenarios), and into TPN (which causes you to seek new information and get curious about what’s actually happening.) It’s hard to ruminate and spiral when you actively practice curiosity.
Here’s a list of the most common cognitive distortions - use it to shift out of your DMN and into your TPN, and practice curiosity to prevent contempt from surfacing. - Ask clarifying questions.
The easiest way to exercise curiosity is by asking clarifying questions. You might say something like, "My brain immediately assumed... but I'm guessing there's probably a better reason for what happened. Could you help me see your POV?"
For further reading, please see my write-up on how to resolve conflict, and jump down to the "emotional bias" and "steelman" sections.
Moving into the non-lizard brain
The reality is that over 65% of companies fail because of cofounder conflict. I'd be willing to bet that nearly 100% of those cofounder conflicts were the result of contempt brooding slowly and festering over time, the same death by a thousand paper cuts that kills your relationship: with your girlfriend or boyfriend, with your best friend, with your cofounder. At least one person felt it, did nothing about it, and allowed the relationship to die.
Contempt undermines everything we try to build: at home, at work, everywhere. But it doesn't have to win. You now have the tools to recognize when you're in the Formula of Contempt, and what to do about it.
So the next time you find yourself judging your partner, spouse, cofounder, friend, children, or anyone whose relationship you value, see if you can identify those assumptions you're making. You won't be perfect and you won't get rid of contempt forever from your life, but it's a pretty damn good start.
