Someone mentioned the other day that you can’t control how others see you and somehow that was just mind-blowing to me.

I tell my clients this all the time (and wrote about it in an earlier post) – you have to be prepared to be the villain in your former partner’s story. But somehow this didn’t extend beyond that idea to me until recently.

We interact with so many people in so many limited ways that we form limited pictures of others. We are not in control of their picture of us and vice versa.

One of my good friends – actually, the woman who performed our wedding – is a hiking friend. Almost our whole relationship has been in outdoor gear with backpacks on. When she was trying to figure out what to wear for our wedding, she sent me a picture in a dress and I literally laughed out loud. I’d never seen her in anything fancier than jeans and somehow it didn’t occur to me to think of her dressed up.

This is a silly example, but the concept holds. How many kids do you think of as years younger than they actually are? How many work friends have serious hobbies you knew nothing about? We so often build limited relationships with people.

Sometimes this idea can take a challenging turn. People that knew you when you were younger or really into a particular hobby or identifying in a certain way that you have evolved from, may not evolve with you. They may intentionally remember who you were, not who you are. Your family may treat you as the irresponsible teenager no matter how professional and responsible you’ve become. Your siblings may still pick on you now matter how much you’ve gotten things together.

You can only impact how you let this treatment matter to you. You don’t have to subject yourself to behavior that makes you feel bad about yourself. If spending time with family is making you less mentally healthy, limit time with family. If continuing to participate in an activity that you’ve lost the zeal for isn’t fulfilling you, find a way to work the relationships you want to preserve into something else that is more fulfilling. If you want someone to have a more complete picture of who you are and you want to make your relationship more multi-faceted, you have to show them all the angles.

But you cannot control how they see you. You can control whether how they see you hurts you. Oftentimes people, especially family, will choose to remember and recognize the version of you that makes them most comfortable regardless of how it makes you feel. Changing that perspective requires work and attention to point out that that version of you that makes them comfortable makes you uncomfortable.

Give people the benefit of the doubt that they are not trying to intentionally hurt your feelings or make you feel uncomfortable. Give them the opportunity to change and adjust. But you don’t have to give them the opportunity to hurt you when they’ve made it clear they won’t adjust. That choice is yours alone.

Take care of yourself and control the things you can control.