The mean girl set up to make you look like the problem

You walk into a party, a school event, or even work, you see her, you make brief eye contact but she looks away quickly. Her body language is even closed off and when you go up to her to say hello, her response is short, even flat. So what do you do? You take that as a social cue to disengage or frankly, as a sign to not even approach her because it feels like the most appropriate thing to do in the moment. So you excuse yourself because you read the room. The problem is that later, when you’re not around, she’s telling other people, see: “She didn’t even say hi to me,” or “I tried but she seemed off.” She flipped the narrative and somehow everyone believes her and they’re acting colder, a little more distant, and you’re left to wonder why.

This can be one of the hardest things to catch because you didn’t say anything rude, you were simply just matching her energy. I like to call what she’s doing right now, as manufactured deniability. She just created a situation where your reaction is completely reasonable but later on is used to create a different story about you. And if ever comes back to you, she can easily say: “I never said that” or “I didn’t do anything.” Everyone just missed the set up.

And they believe it so easily because they didn’t se e the beginning. The closed off energy, the shut down, the moment that made you step back. They only saw the warmth she gave them and the story she casually repeated. And the unfortunate truth is that people tend to believe and go with the story that’s easiest to understand.

So what do you do about it?

-If you make eye contact, greet her casually. “Hey, good to see you. I’m going to go grab a drink and I'll catch you later.” Then excuse yourself. This way, you said hello and never had to force a conversation.

-Don’t match her cold energy because now you’re the one that’s going to look bad. If you see her again in a group setting, you can call out that you said hello earlier, something like, “We said hi earlier, right?” or “I saw you earlier, hi again.” That way everyone is seeing that you did greet her. We don’t want to act overly nice because it can come off fake or inauthentic, you goal is neutral and civil. Then you can switch to talking to the others in the group.

-Make sure that your behavior is consistent across the room, that no one can call it out. And if you didn’t say hello earlier because she was trying to avoid you but now you’re in a group, you can say something like, “I couldn’t tell earlier if you were in the middle of something, how are you doing?” Now you put the initial energy back in the conversation and you never accused her.

Your Final Takeaway:

Your end goal isn’t to expose her or win her over, you’re just trying to come off consistent so the story that you’re the bad or rude one doesn’t hold any weight.

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xo,

Dr. C