The Lasting Harm of Microaggressions
How our relationshsips die one tiny unkindness at a time
Relationships can end in lots of different ways. They can end in a big bang — when your partner cheats on you or your colleague throws you under the bus to secure their own advancement. These endings are obvious to all. There is another kind of ending that is more subtle and more harmful to people. By microaggressions. This could be someone that doesn’t say “thank you” or someone that talks over another person or a myriad of different ways. Yet over time this can lead us to truly dislike other human beings.
A large part of the problem is that microaggressions, when looked at in isolation, are trivial in the grand scheme of things. This makes it hard to both provide and receive feedback about them. The giver of the feedback can feel (and be made to feel) petty in raising such a small issue. Yet a microaggression will chafe the recipient over time and this leads to harm in current and future relationships. If you are talked over a lot then each new instance of being talked over is not unique — it’s a continuation of an existing pattern. You experience the frustration of the microaggression within the context of hundreds (if not thousands) of previous interactions. If I’ve run a marathon and my feet are chafed then the act of walking becomes painful. This is not normally a painful activity but the…
