"They did it on purpose"

You walk into the kitchen at work and two colleagues stop talking. A text you sent yesterday morning still has no reply. An email about a project you're part of goes to six people, and you aren't one of them.

Someone who has been badly treated reads these quickly. They were talking about me. She's ignoring me. I was left off deliberately. The reading arrives in well under a second and it feels like something you saw, when in fact you guessed it.

This is understandable, and up to a point it's sensible. If a partner lied to you for a year, you'd be foolish not to be warier afterwards. People who have been hurt watch for the next hurt. And sometimes the quick reading is right. People do talk behind backs, and people are left off emails on purpose.

Some research bears on this, and it's the nearest thing there is to a study of the subject of this book. In 2020 Rahav Gabay and colleagues in Israel published a questionnaire measuring what they called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood. They meant a lasting sense of being the victim across many kinds of relationship. They found it had four parts. One was a strong need for your suffering to be recognised. One was a sense of being morally better than the people who hurt you. The other two were having little room for other people's suffering, and going over past hurts again and again.

In one study, people read short descriptions of unclear situations. Those who scored higher on the questionnaire were more likely to expect to be hurt in them. In another, people imagined being a lawyer getting critical feedback from a senior partner, and the story was written so that you couldn't tell whether the criticism was deserved. Higher scorers were more inclined to put the criticism down to the partner's bad character or bad intentions, and they were keener on revenge. The links were modest. Everyone in the studies was a Jewish Israeli adult answering questions online or on paper. It's a first sketch, and I wouldn't treat it as settled.

The mechanism is easy to follow all the same. You fill an unclear event with the worst available reading, and the reading then gets filed as another wrong. The file grows. The bigger it is, the more obvious it seems that the next unclear event belongs in it too. Meanwhile you've been cool with the two colleagues in the kitchen. They've noticed, and they really are a little cooler with you now. In that way the file can make some of its own evidence.

A referee who watches only one team will finish the match sure that team committed every foul. He hasn't invented any of the fouls he saw. He just never looked at the other half of the pitch.

Here I have to be careful. This is exactly where the phrase "victim mentality" gets misused. It's used to tell people that bullying or discrimination is all in their head. Patterns are real. Suppose the same thing keeps happening to you, from the same person or the same organisation, and it doesn't happen to colleagues who differ from you in sex, race, age or health. That's evidence, and you should treat it as evidence. Keep a written log with dates, what was said and who was there. It's the first thing a union rep or a solicitor will ask for.

What I'm describing is narrower. It's the single unclear event, read in an instant, and never checked.

For those, try three explanations. When something stings and the facts are thin, write down your first reading. Then write two others that are at least as likely. The colleagues might have been talking about a surprise for someone, or about one of their own troubles. Your friend might have read the text in a queue and forgotten it. The email list might have been copied from an old one. You don't have to believe the alternatives. You only have to admit that they fit the facts as well as your first reading did.

Then, where it matters, check. "I noticed I wasn't on the email about the project. Was that deliberate?" This is a move in the sense this book means. Most of the time the answer will be dull. When it isn't dull, you've learned something solid, which is worth more than a suspicion.

It also helps to keep harm and intent apart. Something can hurt you without having been aimed at you. Carelessness still counts, and you can still raise it. But "you forgot me, and I minded" opens a different conversation from "you wanted to hurt me". The first is usually nearer the truth, and it's far more likely to go well.