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I feel like my older coworker doesn't take me seriously at all because of my age. They're always making passive-aggressive comments about my contributions, like "That's a good idea for someone your age," or, "I'm surprised you knew that". I want to ask them why they're doing this and try to get them to stop, but I don't want to come across as a complainer, since they always talk about how whiny and entitled my generation is. What should I do here?
For me, there are few things harder to resist responding to than negging (which is exactly what this person is doing to you). When someone gives me a compliment but qualifies it in some way, so as to discount its importance, a little voice in my head starts saying stuff like, "You need to prove yourself here, show them that they're wrong, and put them in their place!"
Most of my younger adult life was spent on this hamster wheel of defending my worth to people who had already decided who I was. But I've learned something very important about backhanded compliments. They actually aren't about us at all - they're about the person dishing them out. And I think that sometimes, negging is more of a fear response than an actual conscious tactic (and I'd go so far as to say that even when it's conscious, it's still coming from a place of scarcity and fear).
When someone feels insecure or threatened because you had a great idea in a meeting, or you lost that baby weight way faster than they did, or you've achieved a higher level of success than they had at your age, they feel the need to self-protect against shame. For people who can't simply acknowledge to themselves, "Wow, I notice that I feel afraid that Jess's great idea in that meeting makes me look like I'm not as good at my job as her," and sit with that discomfort, backhanded compliments are an attempt to minimize cognitive dissonance and "even the playing field" so to speak.
Or, sometimes they just want to fuck with you.
Whatever their motivation is, asking someone who's in a habit of negging you to acknowledge the harm and change the behavior will rarely achieve the outcome you're hoping for. Think about it: if they were capable of the level of reflection and earnest engagement it would take to hear how their words are hurting you and commit to change, they likely wouldn't act like this in the first place.
Ok, so what should I do?
Before you decide how to handle this coworker, it's important to get clear on what you really want out of this situation.
This corresponds to the part of the Say the Hard Things framework where we decide on our goals for an interaction, after we've done the work of grappling with our own self-worth and moving from shame to clarity. If we skip those inner-work steps in favor of jumping straight to "what to say", we run the risk of outsourcing our sense of self to the other person's behavior.
Here are a few potential goals one might have in this situation.
My goal is to get them to apologize and stop saying stuff like this.
I would strongly recommend recalibrating your goal, because someone negging from a place of fear usually isn't in a place to hear your feedback and act on it. This is the type of conversational goal that feels satisfying in theory but often hollow in practice; if you leave empty-handed, you could wind up feeling even worse.
I want to let them know that I see what they're doing.
This is a more productive goal, because no matter how they respond, you can feel good knowing that you achieved your desired outcome. Also, this is the easiest goal to achieve and can often be done in a variety of ways that are also pretty satisfying, if I do say so myself.
- Extinction, or the "Gray Rock Method"
Withhold the reward the person is seeking by refusing to respond to it. You can give some kind of neutral acknowledgement, like "Oh, okay," or simply stare blankly and say nothing. It's important to keep your body language and expression completely neutral; if you shift uncomfortably or make a disgusted face, it reinforces the behavior. - Quick, witty remark
Smile and say something like, "Wow, that was almost a compliment!" or "Ope, so close!" and then keep it movin' on to the next subject. - Ask them to explain
Backhanded complimenters rely on social sanctions to execute this behavior successfully. It's usually pretty clear what they're really trying to say, and they do it to watch us squirm uncomfortably. If you refuse to play along, stopping to really hone in on exactly what they meant, it takes all the fun out of it for them and hands the discomfort back to its rightful owner. This sounds something like, "I'm sorry, I don't follow; could you say more about how my age factors in?" or "Oh, I'm curious - why did my knowing that surprise you?" Make sure this is delivered with genuine curiosity in order for it to land. If you're conveying anger or defensiveness, they still get that little psychological reward they're after.
I want to feel solid and proud of how I handle the situation, no matter what they do.
This goal is especially powerful because you have complete control over whether you attain it or not; in no way does it depend on the other person's behavior.
It's also the goal that takes the most internal work. When someone negs us, two things are happening:
- A physiological event
Our brain hears the comment, interprets it as a threat, and triggers our survival reflexes; we feel things like increased heart rate, flushing in our face, adrenaline, and so on. - A meaning-making moment
We hear the comment and immediately start trying to decide what it means about us; we might second-guess ourselves or think there's something wrong with us. If we don't already have a solid sense of who we are and who we want to be, this leaves us vulnerable to accepting the other person's framing, which triggers shame.
To choose a response that helps us to feel confident and proud of ourselves, we must quickly override the biological response by recognizing it for what it is, and we need to be able to stay grounded in our values and navigate any shame triggers that we feel being tripped.
I encourage you to spend some time clarifying your values if you haven't done so already; there are countless tools and books out there that outline different approaches to doing this. Once you have that figured out, it's just a matter of recognizing when shame gets triggered and reframing the situation to make it clear to yourself that what they're saying isn't a reflection of who you are, it's about whatever baggage or shame the other person has that is causing them to feel threatened by you and act out like a Mean Girl in a high school cafeteria.
In my Say the Hard Things framework, I call this process pivoting to clarity. If you want a step-by-step deep dive into how it works, I encourage you to consider joining my in The Living Room, which is Human First's online community where I teach the framework through weekly live workshops.
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