Well Jorge, it’s not my experience with that person. I cannot tell you how many times I heard this phrase, and experienced its immense gaslighting effect, when sharing another story of being betrayed, abused, or cheated by someone that I and the person I was sharing with both knew. At first, such responses made me question my own reality: did the betrayal, the abuse, or the cheating really take place, or is it just my perception? Maybe the problem was within me – like, I was “too sensitive”, as I’ve been told hundreds of times?

This bullshit thinking was both related to my individual background – being raised in a household where gaslighting was a relational constant – and also to the cultural messages of fast-food psychology, positing that “everything is perception” and dismissing the uncomfortable work of exploring and acknowledging tough facets of reality.

But as critical thinking kicked in, I understood that the harmful behaviors I talked about were real. Then another tough question emerged: Why did this person who hurt me appear so good to others? Why betrayal, abuse, cheating, hypocrisy, manipulation were my experience with this person, but not everybody else’s experience with them?

One answer, coming from clinical psychology, would be: “Because narcissists are very skilled at looking good for those they need to look good for.” With years, though, my understanding of this evolved with a broader perspective – one coming from the field of social work. From understanding interpersonal dynamics through the prism of oppression, privilege, power, and perceived social hierarchy. Although I understood it, I couldn’t verbalize it until I came across this sentence in the novel The Fault In Our Stars:

“You can see who people really are by the way they treat waiters and secretaries.”

HOLY SHIT. This was it. This was what I experienced my entire life. Technically, I’ve never been a waiter or a secretary, but the dynamics were exactly the same: every time I got abused, betrayed, or cheated, this person was in the position of privilege and power over me. This is what made them feel entitled and licensed to do anything and able to get away with it. This is what gave them the full freedom to show their true colors towards me – because they knew there would be no consequences.

And every time I tried to bring about accountability – by telling others about my experience – I wasn’t believed because the people I shared with never had the same social positionality I had. In truth, they never had the same experience with my offender – not because my offender was a good person, but because their level of power and privilege was the same as, or even higher than, that of my offender. Ironically, this encouraged me to reach out to them in the first place – because from my underprivileged position I had no power to bring any accountability. What I didn’t understand is that from their spot in the power hierarchy, the true colors of a person fully transparent and readily exposed to me were completely invisible. By nature, Social Pyramid has One-way Transparency, hence the abbreviation The SPOT Effect. When you’re looking at a person from below in terms of power hierarchy, their dirty, stinking underwear is readily visible. They don’t hesitate to spit on you and shit on you. When you’re looking at the same person from above, or from the same level, the only thing you get to see is their nice, phony, bleached smiles.

So before dismissing someone’s traumatic relational experience with someone else that we know, before denying them empathy and making them question their reality, practice some critical awareness. Think about power, privilege and social positionality – and how they explain why the behavior of the same person towards you and towards them can in fact be so drastically different.

And finally, ask yourself: if this person practices kindness, empathy, honesty, and care towards me and abuse, betrayal, hypocrisy, and manipulation towards another, then how genuine is what they practice towards me?

Can genuine kindness, empathy, care, and honesty be selective? Can their practice depend on social positionality or other external factors?

The answers, although quite tough, are very obvious.

A related piece of my #MeToo story: