Handling Insults
This week you will work with one of the most personal provocations a person faces: the insult, the sneer, the contempt of another. The seven passages move you through a precise progression, from learning to notice your own reaction, to understanding the insulter, to arriving at a place where others' contempt simply loses its grip. Each day builds on the last, so stay with the sequence.
Passage
When someone treats you ill or speaks ill of you, remember that he acts or speaks thus because he thinks it is incumbent upon him. That being the case, it is impossible for him to follow what appears good to you, but what appears good to himself; whence it follows, that, if he gets a wrong view of things, the man that suffers is the man that has been deceived. For if a person thinks a true composite judgement to be false, the composite judgement does not suffer, but the person who has been deceived. If, therefore, you start from this point of view, you will be gentle with the man who reviles you. For you should say on each occasion, “He thought that way about it.”
— Epictetus, Handbook 42
Reflection
Today the lens shifts from your interior to the insulter's. Epictetus makes a move that is almost clinical: the person who treats you badly does so because it seems right to him, according to his own view of things. If his view is mistaken, he is the one who has been deceived, not you. The composite judgement, the claim he is making about you, does not suffer when he gets it wrong. Only the person holding the false view suffers the consequences of holding it. This reframing asks you to feel something close to pity, not contempt, not superiority, but genuine recognition that the insulter is working from inside his own distorted picture of things.
Go deeper
Can you identify what false or distorted picture of things the person who slighted you might have been operating from, and what, if anything, might have put that picture there?
Practice
The Deceived Person
Take five minutes to write a short, honest account of a recent insulter, not what they said about you, but what view of the world or of themselves might have led them to say it. Try to be specific rather than charitable in a vague way. What pressures, fears, or misconceptions might be shaping their picture? You do not need to excuse them. You are simply trying to see them clearly.