Your confusion stems from the fact that you're not seeing the semantics at play in each language in those two sentences. In English, we say "**do** something **to** someone" where *someone* logically is the indirect (dative, not accusative!) object, recipient of the verb **do**. However, in Russian, the semantics change; instead of **doing** something **to** someone, they **act** (поступать) a certain way ***with*** (с) someone. In other words, your error here was expecting a dative based on English usage instead of parsing the Russian apart from the English. Russian: **Как ты мог так поступить со мной?** *How you could so act with me?* English: ** ** Same meaning — two different forms of expression.