Why treating someone fairly won't make them feel treated fairly

Why does treating someone fairly sometimes fail to make them feel treated fairly at all?

Lou Herbert, a company president bringing his son to a treatment program, insists he has done everything right by his boy. He fed him, paid for him, defended his family name in public. And yet Cory, his son, calls him a bigger loser as a parent than he'll ever be as a son. Weeks earlier, five of Lou's top executives walked out of his boardroom, calling him a tyrant and a micromanager, even though Lou believed he had given each of them everything.

Avi Rozen, teaching a group of parents at Camp Moriah, offers an explanation Lou resists at first: people respond to our way of being toward them, not primarily to our behavior. Lou could treat Cory with outward civility and still provoke rage, because Cory was reacting to how Lou regarded him underneath the civility, as a problem to be managed, a source of shame, an object rather than a son. Rozen points out something stranger still: we sometimes act against our own interests specifically to provoke conflict, poking others in the eye even when it costs us the outcome we say we want, because some part of us needs the other person to be in the wrong.

This matters practically in three ways, according to Rozen. A heart at war can't see situations clearly, because it's busy building a case. It can't seriously consider another person's objections, which is fatal in any negotiation, Lou is in the middle of a stalled union negotiation when he hears this and recognizes himself instantly. And it invites exactly the resistance it's trying to overcome, since children, employees, and partners tend to sense contempt however carefully it's disguised, and they answer contempt with resistance rather than cooperation.

None of this means behavior doesn't matter. It means behavior is not enough on its own, and correcting someone's actions while your heart stays at war is a strategy that tends to produce more of what you were trying to fix in the first place.

Pick one relationship that keeps going wrong despite your best behavior, and look back at your last three run-ins with fresh eyes, asking whether you were quietly seeing this person as a rival to manage rather than someone to understand. When they react as though you've mistreated them even though you know you were technically fair, consider that they may be answering your way of being rather than your words. Try rehearsing the same message with a genuinely different regard for them and notice how differently it lands before you've even said much. And watch for the moments you provoke a reaction that actually hurts your own position, because that's usually a sign you needed them to be wrong more than you needed the problem solved.