“What’s wrong with you?”
My body immediately reacted. I was taken aback by how strongly I objected to hearing one of my kids say it to another. I knew I needed to be able to explain why I felt it so strongly.
If you’re angry, tell her what she did. Tell her you didn’t like it. Tell her you’re mad. You can even tell her you thought what she did was mean. But “What’s wrong with you?” is different. Now you are saying there is something wrong with her.
That distinction seems simple enough to teach a child. It is much harder to hold onto as adults.
Conflict begins with something that happened between two people. You did something. I experienced it in a particular way. I had a reaction to it. Maybe I felt hurt or dismissed. Maybe I thought you were inconsiderate or what you did crossed a line for me.
“What’s wrong with you?” changes the structure of the conflict. We were talking about what happened. Now we are talking about what you are. There is something particularly damaging about that move because suddenly I disappear.
If I tell you that I felt dismissed when you walked away while I was talking, I have put myself into the conversation. I am telling you how I experienced what happened. There is something here for us to look at. You might tell me you weren’t trying to dismiss me. You might understand why I experienced it that way. We might discover that we understood the same moment completely differently.
If I ask, “What is wrong with you?” I no longer have to account for my part in the encounter. My experience has become fact.
Adults have sophisticated ways of doing this:
“How could you possibly think that?”
“I don’t understand how anyone could do something like that.”
“Anyone would be upset by this.”
“It’s only fair that…”
“No normal person would…”
These statements have the sound of objectivity. I am no longer telling you what I think is fair. I am telling you what is fair. I am suggesting that your choice is incomprehensible.
Sometimes we recruit an imaginary group of reasonable people to stand beside us. Anyone would think this. Everyone knows this. Now you are no longer in an argument with me. You are in an argument with common sense.
The schoolyard question has grown up. “What’s wrong with you?” becomes a claim about fairness, normality, reasonableness, or what any decent person would do. The language is more sophisticated, but the relational move is the same. My experience of you becomes evidence about who you are.
If the problem exists entirely inside you, I no longer have to account for my subjectivity in the encounter. I don’t have to tell you why this affected me so much, what I wanted from you, or what meaning I gave to what happened. I can stand outside the interaction and assess you.
And you have very little room to move from there.
If I say, “You embarrassed me when you made that joke in front of everyone,” there is something you can do with that. You can understand the impact. You can tell me what you intended. You can apologize. We can disagree about whether my reaction makes sense and still have a conversation about what happened.
What can you do with “What’s wrong with you?” It gives you nothing specific to reconsider or repair. The problem is you.
We do not need neutral descriptions of our feelings to be fair to others or to whitewash our upset. We can be furious and still locate the problem in what happened. Sometimes people behave badly. Sometimes something really was selfish or cruel. We are allowed to have judgments about each other’s behavior, including strong ones. In fact, specificity makes those judgments more useful. “You lied to me” tells me exactly what I believe you did. “There is something seriously wrong with you” tells me what I believe you are.
That distinction matters because conflict requires two people who remain people.
Once I position myself as the reasonable one looking down at the defective one, we are getting close to contempt. I am no longer trying to understand what happened between us or asking you to understand my experience. I have made myself the judge of what kind of person you are.
Perhaps that is why the childhood version bothers me so much.
When I tell a child, “Tell her what she did. Don’t tell her what’s wrong with her,” I am teaching something much larger than how to fight nicely.
I am teaching them where to locate the problem. Something happened between you. Stay there.
