Why Would Someone Kick You When You’re Down?

Clearly, a psychopath would get a thrill from adding a little more pain to your misery when things aren’t going your way, but when you’re really down and out, why would people (some people you may have referred to as “friends” not long ago, as well as people you don’t know, or don’t know well at all) take pot shots at you, when you have little or no resources for recovering from the attack or wounds therefrom?

Why would someone kick you when you’re down?

There are people with low self-esteem who find comfort in knowing that someone is worse off than they are. We see this a lot in the personal growth arena, friends who encourage you to do better, something good, because they, “want only the best for you.” That’s all well and good until you start to do better than them, then they start confiding in you to caution and discourage you, because you’re heading into treacherous territory, in an attempt to dissuade you, to prevent you from some success which they find to be elusive for themselves. All the while, praying for your failure so that they can feel better when comforting you, once again, with their, “I tried to warn you,” or, I-told-you-so’s.

The people who would intentionally kick you when you’re already down, are few and far between, though it might not seem so when you are down and out.

What is far more likely, is that as your ability to influence or affect the lives of other people decreases, so does your significance, and if your significance continues to decline, you may appear to be invisible to the rest of society due to your lack of significance.

The Matryoshka Doll

Let’s take a look at the life of a predominant professor at a university whose youngest of three daughters was diagnosed with leukemia and given one year to live. The parents, siblings, and other friends rallied around her. The young girl, not wanting to impose or impede the lives of her friends and relatives took her own life during a sleepover at a friend’s house. This devastated all who loved her so much, the family disintegrated as each member blamed the other.

Looking for some way to make sense of it all and to find some way to feel better, the professor, now disenfranchised from his family, resigned from the university and cashed out his retirement to open a little trinket gift shop in his daughter’s favorite vacation community surrounding himself with the items which would have brought his daughter so much joy. One week into his third month of business, his shop burned down. He lost everything with nothing to fall back on, and sank into a deeper depression.

It wasn’t long and he found himself among the homeless wandering the city. One day, he is visited outside a mission by a young woman whom he barely recognized as the girl who had hosted his daughter’s sleepover on her last night. They embraced, cried, and the young woman gave him something that she (his daughter) had left at her house, a matryoshka doll (also known as a set of Russian nesting dolls). The young woman and the now homeless man parted ways, only now he possessed a priceless treasure (which he had bought her in that very vacation town) representing his little girl’s love for precious gifts. He could find peace playing with the dolls, just like his daughter must have, he felt connected to her, and safe, no matter where he was.

One evening while playing with his matryoshka dolls in an alleyway, tucked away in a doorway, a car barreled down the alley nicking the corner of a dumpster which swung around and nearly hit the man. He was shocked but relieved to find that he hadn’t been harmed, only his matryoshka doll was smashed to pieces.

Three days later, the man’s body was found clutching pieces of a broken matryoshka doll.

Unintentional LIfe Circumstance

To the man, he had suffered a countless succession of bad luck or personal attacks which piled one atop the other, appeared as though everyone was out to get him, or wanted to demonize him. Every time he saw a light of glimmering hope, his hope was abruptly shattered, literally, when the matryoshka doll was crushed. All these things were in reality, unintentional life circumstance taking place all around him with no malice intended. As much as we would all like to believe that the world revolves around us, we’re all just swimming around in the same swirling life soup.

What really happened was that the man had become invisible to society, unable to affect or influence the lives of others. What about his friends and colleagues? Where were they in all of this? In his growing depression he withdrew from otherwise active social circles and in our world today, when everything is so aggressively attempting to gain our attention in every moment of every day, out of sight means out of mind. If you are not reminding your people of your existence, the effect of your existence loses relevancy, except for the occasional story or nostalgic fable which you may have played a part in, in the past.

Feel Better

We, all of us, the man, his daughter, and other family members, friends, colleagues, people he knew and never knew, all are living our own lives from the perspective of our individual bodies, limited to what we can experience via our senses. And we are all looking for a way to find some way to feel better.

From this perspective, nothing exists in the world, except for that which concerns us. Until you read the story, a broken matryoshka doll had no significance to you whatsoever. While the man might have felt his life slipping from him as he asked God why someone would purposefully want to destroy the only thing in life he had to live for? While the joy-riding teenagers didn’t even know the man was there. Their only concern was to make sure the damage to the car from grazing the dumpster was not too noticeable, otherwise, they were just having a good time feeling better, celebrating life.

Same incident. Different perspectives.

In most cases, when it feels like someone is kicking you when you’re down, nothing is further from the truth. The truth of the matter is that people are only living their own lives, doing the best they can with what they have. We all have limited resources, and want to feel a little better. All of us. So, we traverse this planet with blinders on focused on trying to find ways to feel better.

Of course, there are other people with whom we share the planet with, and those who may the ability to influence or affect our lives garner the most of our attention. Our professor at the university, our parents, family members, and friends. Then there are the people who support our lives and our attempt to have a better life, the cashier, gas attendant, engineer, postman, police officer, etc… and those who are making their own ways by embracing negative energies, such as the people engaged in less than legal activities, as well as those who have little or no significance to us, as they fade away into the darkness.

And you take it personally when (metaphorically) someone drives by you in a Lamborghini, when you don’t even have a bicycle. You feel invisible, except for when you make a spectacle of yourself at the street corner holding your “Will Work for Food” sign.

Except for in the rarest of circumstances, people do not intentionally kick you when you are down. They are simply doing the best with what they have and may not realize the affect that their actions (or inactions) might have on the life of someone else. And while we all can try to be mindful about how every breath we take, step we make, word we utter, or dollar we spend affects the lives of everyone who could possibly be affected, to do so would be nothing short of impossible.

The man’s family separated, not because they all blamed him, or each other for the girl’s suicide (which also was not meant to hurt anyone. She was just looking for a way to not be a burden and to feel better herself), but because they had lives to live, and they found it too painful to do so surrounded by constant reminders of the girl’s decision to make her exit in that way, on the blinders went. And they all charged off into different directions, trying to make some sense of life and to find a way to feel better themselves.

Cut yourself some slack, everyone is not out to get you.

No one is kicking you while you’re down, but while you’re down there, find ways to reactivate your life. Don’t let yourself fade away into the nothingness. Find respectable and honorable ways to remind us that you are still here. Keep doing that until more and more of us take notice of you.

You are an amazing person, with a unique purpose, message, passion, and mission for your life. Your experience has powerfully equipped you to help others who may be struggling with the same issues as you have had to deal with. You don’t have to have all the answers, what you do need to do is not give up but get up, take what control you can and carve out a new life for you, a better life, possibly your best life, and make the world a better place.

This is my prayer for you,

-Amen

12 thoughts on “Why Would Someone Kick You When You’re Down?”

  1. it all makes sense now. who knew perspectives matter so much? maybe the solution lies in changing your perspective. if you can think of people pushing you down simply as people pushing you towards the greatness that lies in your future you could change everything. thank you so much for this

  2. I read this entire article and honestly i understand it with the passion because i lost my children a couple years ago to the system and fought fiercely to get them back. My younger child that was only 2 at the time was taken at the hospital for a check up. And even though the doctors cleared her to make sure she was being taken care of from daily situations , enviroments and daycare etc- I was arrested by a police officer for an assumption that i was under the influence. I had in fact made the mistake of being under the influence and had the choice to sober up before taking her for a check up my motherly instict was not thinking about “waiting to take care of my 2 Yr old baby”. So , Long story made short, later on down the line, i did everything i could possibly do longing so deperately for her return just to be taken on an endless battle of dissapointment and false hope by the system. Today it is Feb, 17, 2020 and just lost my rights this past december and my children are now 4 and 7. Im in the exaact same position spiritually that this man was with the world. I feel just about 100 percent disconnected from society because of the depression and lack of work in addition to the loss of my parental rights. Its a very strange feeling from losing touch with the main identity that one once had. Nowadays i have just about no friends and the one i did have turned his energies of rejection and dismissal of who i was as a person and made me feel excluded from deserving the same treatment he gave his other friends. I would then ask myself why it seemed like people like to kick others when their down and find myself painfully wondering whether these actions are intentional or whether they are in fact just living their lives. However, I would have to say that there is truly alot of dishonest people in this world whos mission is to infact demonize and single us out from normal life and reality that humans deserve to have and strive for.

  3. thank you i really needed to see this im in a hardship right now and im going to use this to move forward. H.O.B.S = HOLD ON BE STRONG

  4. I’m sorry. But I started reading this only to be invalidated that ” no one is kicking me while I am down ” I am disabled from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from chronic abuse from my family or origin. Not only do they kick me when im down so do all the narcissits in the world. You act like psychopaths and narcissits don’t exist. Who are you to say one cannot KICK you while your DOWN. Thanks for the invalidating passed up as education. Invalidating Abuse as “they are just living their lives doing the best they can” is not only misinformation its Dangerous.

    1. I don’t know that I’m qualified to respond Lucy. But I want to tell you that I felt and experienced the same thing you described. I worked researching narcissism for almost 5 years and very recently realized that I needed that fight. And a fight it was I had a covert or malignant narcissist bf that was so unbelievably ugly to me everyday I remained in shock that I could not stop going back, jumping up at his every request & all manner of self defeating actions trying to get him to see what a good person I was & so hurt that he knew my family scapegoated me so badly & appeared not to care what happened to me that I almost can’t believe it and boy did I want to just die from the desperation, pain, loneliness & all manner of feel sorry for me. truly everyone I knew saw confirmed it’s him not you. And through my study I found out I was a good person maybe one of the best I got away safely. One day not long ago I realized I had to fight to be me. I fought so hard to be me that I am going to be the best me possible & I truly love the me I am. I know that you are one terrific person with a light so bright so nice so kind so giving & selfless that you are a target of darkness. You are more than it appears. Before this life you may have contracted with these souls to do this to do you so you could learn how amazing you truly are for eternity. Bless all your teachers good & seemingly bad ones you are getting to know why there is a wonderful you!

    2. I agree 100%. Most of these articles are written by people who’ve never truly been down in their lives. If they had, they’d see a whole other side to people, and they wouldn’t like it.

      The real truth of the matter, is that people are egotistical. They’re only nice to people they want something from. If you have nothing to offer them, they’ll think of you as a burden and treat you negatively.
      I also believe this is unconscious, because people are unaware of how selfish they truly are.
      Take it from someone who’s been through it themselves: people are not nice, THEY’RE SELFISH. The writer of this article doesn’t live in reality.
      You should read a book called “Awareness” by Anthony Demello. It speaks of uncommon truths and will definitely give you the validation and confirmation you need to rise above this illusion.

    3. Lucy is the HERO OF MY DAY for disputing this article. I googled this comment only to get a bunch of get over it nonsense so I’m so glad to see a comment so soon that validates what I’m going through. That’s all I was hoping when I put “narcissists love to kick you when you’re down” into the Google search engine and instead I found this crap article.

      They also like to do it after putting on the nice mask for a while. Then they’ll start some fight over something petty. No contact FOREVER seems to be the only way out. Otherwise they’l unexpectedly pull the rug from under your feet at the worst possible moment after playing nice.

      They won’t have me around as a source of sporadically sadistic supply anymore!

    4. The people that kick us when we are already down, are often the same ones that put us there, e.g., narcissistic predators.

    5. Totally agree.
      And to add to that, I don’t think that everyone walks around living life only thinking about their lives and not even considering that the things they do have an impact on other people. I think more than often you understand what impacts your words and actions have even if it’s after the fact. I agreed with some of this but I just think it’s ridiculous to say everyone’s in their own world can’t blame them, you don’t have any empathy you can’t think about others feelings or you can’t say anything nice, there’s something wrong with you.

  5. I went through a gamut of emotions while reading this article. At first I thought “you’re wrong people do intentionally kick people when they’re down” however after I finished I sat and thought about it. Yes, it seems people do kick you when you’re done, however we fail to see things from their perspective. We can only feel what has been done to us, and how it affects us. We might have sympathy or apathy for other peoples plates, but in the end, we really truly cannot relate unless it’s happening to us.

    So let’s flip the script here and talk about this man’s wife. She is left wondering why her husband is choosing to kick her while she’s down. Not only is she dealing with the loss of a child, she has to do with the fact that he has abandoned her and the family. He has cleared their life savings and left her to deal with all the financial burden alone. Not only did her child die, her husband selfishly abandon her and take all their money with him, she’s now not sure if she can even keep her home. The home she cherished because it is where she raised her daughter.

    The couples remaining children are left abandoned by their father and now their Mother who is overwhelmed and struggling too hard to help them cope. This woman would be thinking, why? Why is he doing this to me, why must he kick me when I’m down? He has made her tremendous loss so much worse by purposeful actions.

    You see it’s all about perspective. Most of the time when we are being kicked while down it is because others are selfish and cannot see how or what they do affects us.

    It’s hard not to take it personally but it helps to attempt to see the other side of things. This was a great article. Thank you.

  6. I have tried to engage with these people to try to find a sense of belonging. I have isolated myself for awhile because nothing works. Sorry, but I don’t agree with the doctor. There are a lot of sadist out there. Maybe it’s our society today. It’s really sad. I’m getting by. Humor does help

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