“How people treat other people is a direct reflection of how they feel about themselves.” ~ Paulo Coelho
Have you ever been in a public place and watched someone mistreat a clerk, a server, or a complete stranger? The instinctive reaction is often the same: protect the person being targeted and recoil from the person doing the targeting. Most of us recognize the dynamic immediately.
And if we’re honest, we’ve probably been on both sides of it at one point or another — the aggressor or the recipient, the bully or the bullied — even if only in small, fleeting ways.
Thankfully, we don’t see this kind of behavior as often face-to-face as we do online, where comment sections seem to invite cruelty. But the premise doesn’t change. How we treat one another — especially when no one is forcing us to be kind — says far more about our internal state than it does about the person on the receiving end.
That realization can be uncomfortable, particularly if you’re someone who tends to run roughshod over others without much thought. It forces a mirror where a window would be easier.
This idea isn’t new. It’s been handed to us for decades in books, movies, television, and even Saturday morning cartoons. In Scooby-Doo, the monster was never really a monster at all — it was always an angry, bitter, greedy, self-righteous human with an agenda. The schoolyard bully stealing lunch money was often living in fear or chaos somewhere else. Abuse has a way of reproducing itself.
None of that excuses bad behavior — in others or in ourselves. But understanding the root of it can help us respond without becoming the very thing we say we despise.
So try this: close your eyes for a moment and think about your most recent interaction, whether online or in person. Was it positive or negative? Were you harsher than necessary? Were they? Now set aside the details of the situation and focus instead on something harder to confront: how you felt about yourself in that moment.
If Coelho’s observation holds any truth, those feelings didn’t just influence the interaction — they shaped it.
It’s far easier to fixate on “the other guy” than it is to look inward. But focusing on the other guy is largely pointless. You can’t change them. You can only change you.
The same is true on a larger scale. We may feel powerless watching ugliness play out on the national stage, but we are never powerless locally or personally. The way we speak, the way we listen, the way we choose to show up — those things still matter. And they always start from the inside out.